


The Witness

by BobLoblawLawBlog



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Break Up, Depression, Detective Noir, Drug Addiction, F/M, Gangsters, Gen, Murder Mystery, Police Procedural, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-21
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-02 06:30:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 43,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1053601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BobLoblawLawBlog/pseuds/BobLoblawLawBlog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mako encounters police obstruction when investigating a murder case and must turn to his ex-girlfriend for help. Rated M for sex, drugs, and violence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Greetings, readers. This is the first part in a multi-chapter fic meant to take place a few months after the end of Book 2 and to satisfy my need for more Detective Mako. There is a lot of set-up required here, but the entire fic is outlined, so rest assured that there is a plan. In future chapters, I promise plenty of noir vibes, Makorra, family angst, and Mako being all sad face.
> 
> Comments are much appreciated.

For roughly the fortieth time that night, Mako came back to reality, vaguely aware that the woman across the restaurant table had said something that he managed to completely miss. “Huh?” was all he could manage, snapping his attention back to her green, heavily made-up eyes. 

“I said, I used to follow your team on the pro-bending circuit. Is…is something wrong?”

“Oh, it’s…nothing. Pressure at work and all that. Big case.”

“Something exciting? Oooooh, is it a murder?”

Aware that he was failing to be an entertaining date, he just said “yeah” and hoped it sounded at least a little convincing. It wasn’t in him to admit to her that his promotion had turned out to be a mixed blessing, that the cases were more depressing than exciting, that the expectations were higher, that his new partner was an asshole. 

“But I can’t talk about it. Top secret and all that.”

Her carefully sculpted eyebrows relaxed, and she went back to work on her plate of vegetables, poking daintily with her chopsticks before selecting one piece to bring up to her rouged lips. She was pretty, that was for sure, stylish like Asami but without the refinement that comes with a lifetime of practice. “She’s gonna be big,” Bolin had told him, referring to her nascent career in the mover industry that had burst into life, seemingly overnight, even though Varrick was still missing. “And she’s been asking questions about you.”

This was only the latest in a litany of setups that his brother had arranged for him, and even though he psyched himself up for each date with mantras like “it will be good practice” and “you need a distraction anyway,” his interest had yet to be captured. 

“Your last girlfriend turned into a giant blue spirit and saved the world from 10,000 years of darkness, bro. You are going to have to adjust your standards,” his brother had advised, along with, “Show interest in them. That’s all they care about.”

Maybe that was the problem. 

“So, movers,” he started. “That must be interesting.”

She perked up, sweeping her dyed yellow hair away from her face, but as she started describing her latest role—a heroine who falls hopelessly in love with a man she can’t have—his brain did that thing again where his vision went out of focus and her words, along with the sounds of the restaurant around him became a faint buzz. He tried to focus, and when that failed, he feigned attentiveness by nodding when it seemed appropriate and saying something like “That’s incredible” whenever she stopped talking. 

It was a relief when the check came, and he walked around the table to hold out his hand. He had been a terrible date, and he was sure she was ready to be done with him. But he could at least walk her home. 

She continued to talk while they walked, and he continued to nod, and tried to find something in all of her chatter to bring him back to the present, to tether him to reality. It wasn’t her fault exactly. He was finding it difficult to feel an interest in anything lately. Not even the look of the streets at night after a good rain—a sight that used to fill him with a sense of calm and connectedness to the world around him—could penetrate this sense of dullness, the feeling that he was watching the world through frosted glass and could only vaguely see the shapes.

“You’re a good listener,” she said, smiling brightly as they reached her door. And without warning, he was being kissed. And for reasons he couldn’t enumerate, he was kissing back. It was…different, he thought. Nice, but different—a little too wet, perhaps, her lips somehow still slick from her lipstick. Her finely manicured hands latched onto his coat to pull him closer, and he found himself relaxing into the embrace, letting his hands rest against her lower back and sweeping his tongue into her mouth until she made a sound deep in her throat. 

“And you’re an even better kisser,” she purred. “Wanna come up for a drink?”

It wasn’t the first time someone had offered, and it wouldn’t have been the first time he accepted, but he knew better than to get into this sort of thing again. Last time, he’d wound up necking with one girl on her sofa before she abruptly unbuttoned his pants and lowered her head with a messy grin only to find that he was still soft. And no amount of effort could get him hard even when she put her mouth on him, and he’d had to make some excuses about having too much to drink before leaving and hoping he never, ever ran into that woman again. 

So he mumbled something about needing to be at work early, and said, “I’ll call you,” before kicking himself inside because no, he really wouldn’t and why did he keep saying stuff like that? His date was nonplussed, shrugging before she bounded up the stairs, and he turned to go home, where, if he was honest with himself, he would most likely lie awake thinking about dark skin and a brilliant smile and strong hands that pulled his hair until it hurt just right until he gave in and jerked off before falling asleep in the wee hours of the morning, hating himself and his stupid inability to just move on.

The electric light in his apartment seemed harsh, almost judgmental, bathing his spare, tidy living space in its yellow glow. Even after dinner, he was still hungry. So he rooted around in the icebox for leftover dumplings that still smelled ok and ate them at the table, cold. He stared into space until his eye fell on the newspaper, lying unopened where he had thrown it down that morning. TRIUMPHANT AVATAR RETURNS TO REPUBLIC CITY, it read, and there was a picture of her looking radiant with Tenzin at her side. She’d spent two months down South helping to set things right and spending much-needed time with her family. Now she was back. And theoretically, the two of them were on good terms. So at some point—again, theoretically—he would see her. 

Mako stuffed the remaining dumplings back in the icebox, no longer hungry. And on his way to bed, he chucked the newspaper in the waste bin. 

 

“Soooooo, how was the date?” 

Even though Bolin had kept his new apartment (he’d signed a lease after all), he still showed up early three or four times a week so that Mako could cook him breakfast, saying that Mako would waste away without someone to feed and care for, so he, Bolin, might as well do his brotherly duty. (He actually wasn’t that far off base). 

The older brother made the short walk from his bedroom door to the kitchen in silence, slapping at the feet Bolin had propped up on his nice, clean table. 

Reading all he needed to know from his brother’s sulking, he shrugged and said, “Gonna have to work on that charm there, bro.”

“I got two girls to date me, didn’t I?” He sulkily retrieved the soup Bo liked that he always kept on hand, and banged a pot on the gas stove.

“Yeah, and that worked out just splendidly for you. Speaking of which, we’re having a Team Avatar get together tonight to welcome Korra home. Narook’s at 8:00. Don’t be late.”

Mako turned on the gas and sparked fire between his fingers to light the burner, momentarily mesmerized by the way the jets came alive with flames that went from blue to yellow as they fanned outward. 

“Okay?” Bo asked after getting no answer for a few seconds.

“I can’t go,” his brother said without looking at him. “I’ve gotta work late.”

The younger brother was unimpressed. “But you’re going in early,” he said, gesturing at Mako’s uniform. 

“Double shift.”

“Kay.” 

A few minutes passed as Mako brought the soup to a simmer and ladled up a helping for each of them.

“You guys agreed to stay friends down at the South Pole, didn’t you?”

“Bo,” he said, setting the bowls down on the table just a little too hard. “I really do have to work.”

“Ok,” he said. “Whatever. I believe you.”

“Go ahead and have fun. I’ll meet you there when I can.”

“Sure.”

“I will.”

“Uh huh.”

 

Mako liked to keep a tidy desk, always attending to case files as soon as possible to keep the paperwork from piling up. He wished he could say the same for his partner, whose adjacent workspace—a vortex of chaos—was always threatening to overflow onto Mako’s. He picked through the disorder looking for the file he needed, finding what looked like a stale, half-eaten Varricake stuck to the bottom of a witness report, the testimony of a young woman who had watched as triad thugs beat her boyfriend to a bloody pulp when he failed to pay the money he owed. The young man was still in the hospital.

Having lived for nearly a decade on the street, Mako had thought he was intimately acquainted with the full breadth and scope of human suffering, but seeing it from this perspective and in such horrifying volume—case after case after case—was something else. And if anything, it seemed like things had only gotten worse. The trafficking of contraband had always been an issue in Republic City, but the opening of the spirit portals had made widely available an exotic drug that was now poised to replace the old stand-by, opium. It was made from processing an herb that took on “special” properties when it grew near areas of spiritual activity. People were literally dying to get their hands on it. 

“Hey, kid. Quit messing up my desk!” Zhang lumbered in, his craggy, smoke-ruined voice ringing off the metal walls of the bullpen. 

Mako held up the jelly-smeared witness report. “I was looking for this. We were supposed to close this file a week ago.”

Zhang wiped a dirty hand on his uniform pants and took the paper from him. “Oh yeah. Fucking tar-head. Right. Good on you. Close the file.”

Mako knew that police work could desensitize you, but he was unprepared for his partner’s degree of nonchalance in the face of the misery they witnessed on a regular basis. While Republic City’s seedy underground regularly disgusted him, Mako’s partner treated addicts—“tar-heads,” after the street name of their new poison of choice—with an indifference bred of contempt. 

Mako slid the report into its proper spot and did a poor job of masking his annoyance as he did so.  
“You got a problem?” Zhang growled.

“No.” But he couldn’t resist. “We just… we can’t be losing this sort of stuff.”

“Hey, kid, if you have some sort of problem with the way I’ve do my job, which I’ve been doing, by the way, since before you were a dirty thought, by all means…speak up.” He gestured sarcastically, as if giving Mako the floor. 

“And it took you almost my entire lifetime to get promoted,” Mako thought but did no say as he sat down to his neat stacks, nudging at Zhang’s mess until everything was on the correct side of the line that separated their workspaces. It was petty, but passive aggression was pretty much the only tool in his box at the moment. 

He stared at the file in front of him until the characters on the page turned to nonsense before his eyes. “Concentrate,” he thought, but it wasn’t any use. Every attempt to focus was derailed by the foggy numbness that kept taking over his brain and the persistent agitation that made his skin prickle and his toes curl inside his boots until they cracked, over and over. Not even his partner’s lax and disgusting habits could completely explain it. It was an ache that seemed to be without source, without name, that disturbed his sleep and made every waking minute exhausting. 

The sound of the telephone was a welcome interruption from this daydream about absolutely nothing. Mako grabbed for it, but Zhang got there first. 

“Uh huh. Uh huh. Got it,” the older officer said before slamming down the receiver hard enough to make both desks shake. “We’re off, kid. Double homicide.”

 

It was the first really cold day after an unusually mild autumn. The ground was wet with the drizzle that kept threatening to turn to sleet. Everything—the city, the buildings, the streets—was monochrome, an undifferentiated grey mass. Mako pulled his overcoat a little tighter around his body and used his inner fire to try to keep ahead of the chill as he stepped out of the police cruiser into one of the bleakest back alleys he had ever seen. The walls of the surrounding buildings seemed to lean toward one another until the sky became nothing more than a grey slit. Rank-smelling passages ran off in each direction, and perilous looking fire escapes darted precipitously upward toward windows that probably hadn’t been opened in years. 

Just ahead, he could see first responders milling around two bodies. The first time he’d been to this kind of scene was both thrilling and disturbing, but now…

“Two victims,” said the first officer on the scene, as if he was reciting from a script. “One male, one female. Non-benders. They were found this morning by someone who says they were cleaning up garbage.”

Mako looked in either direction and decided that this was unlikely. He approached the two bodies and knelt down to where the woman lay curled next to the man, eyes open in a ghastly look of pain and terror. Her hair was singed, and Mako swallowed the rising bile as the smell of burnt flesh filled his nostrils. There was blood all over the man’s jacket. It looked like they had been both burnt and stabbed. 

“Any witnesses?” Zhang asked. 

“Not that we’ve been able to track down. We knocked on doors all around here, but no one saw or heard nothin. You know how people around here are about talking to cops.”

Mako knew. He noticed that the corpses in front of him were dressed cheaply but not without thought. The man’s beard—what was left of it anyway—looked well-kempt, and the woman was wearing stockings and what was probably the only pair of earrings she owned. Carefully, he reached a gloved hand into the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out a wallet and a paper bag. The wallet contained a few yuans and an ID card, but nothing else. “Liu Jie,” he said. “Registered in the Dragon Flats district. Non-bender.”

He knew what he would likely find in the little paper bag. He’d seen too many of these lately, but he looked anyway and found the expected black powder. “Tar,” he said, looking over to where his partner was rifling through the woman’s pockets. 

“Well, looks like she had a taste too,” Zhang said. “Triad hit or drug deal gone bad, I guess.” 

“But why are the drugs still on the bodies?” Mako asked. 

Zhang shrugged. “Maybe whoever killed them got scared off.”

Mako took another look at this completely deserted alleyway and decided that didn’t add up. 

Other than the state of the bodies, evidence was pretty scarce. Mako noticed a trail of muddy footprints that looked like a child’s heading off in one direction, but there was no way to tell it they were connected. He logged it anyway before Zhang dragged him out of the way so that the coroner could come and do his work. 

“It doesn’t make sense,” Mako said.

“Never does,” said Zhang. “Tar makes people do crazy things.”

This was true. Most people thought that the name came from the deep obsidian color of the drug once it was processed, but those close to the problem knew that it was short for “Avatar” because the high you got from it supposedly made you feel like you were in the Avatar State, like you could do anything. Some people tried. 

“We’re missing something. Tar sells for four hundred yuans per gram. Each of them had at least five grams on them. Why would you leave that kind of stash on the bodies?”

“I don’t know, kid. Maybe they weren’t after the drugs. Maybe it was just some lunatic who attacked them out of nowhere. Maybe it was an argument.”

Zhang could tell Mako wasn’t buying it.

“Look, kid. I’ve been doing this a long time. Lots of shit don’t make sense. Let’s go back to headquarters and see if either of these poor shits had a record. That’ll tell us something.”

The sound of the slamming cruiser door rang in Mako’s ears, and as Zhang slowly pulled away, he watched the bodies being draped onto stretchers and covered with sheets before being loaded into the waiting ambulance. Mako knew all too well where bodies found in this way ended up.

 

“Liu Jie and Xia. Married. Arrested three times for opium possession in the past ten years. Convicted once. He did two years. She got probation. Typical. Known triad ties.” Zhang read off the victim’s files in a monotone while Mako leaned back in his desk chair, arms crossed.

“Family?” he asked.

“As of three years ago, it looks like they had a kid. The broad’s mother took it last time they got arrested.”  
“Someone should go talk to them.”

“So alert social services. Looks like the kid will be better without them anyway. Coupla low life addict thugs.”

Mako shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “No, I mean we should go interview them—find out if anyone had it out for the parents.”

Zhang looked at him skeptically. “And what good would that do exactly?”

“I don’t know,” Mako said incredulously. “Isn’t it our job to find whoever killed them?”

“I’m telling you, kid. This was a drug deal gone south. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Maybe there’s more to it. Maybe there ain’t. But right now we got ten open cases here, some of them on people who were not out to destroy their own lives, and we need to concentrate on those.”

“But…”

“Look, you wanna make sure this shit don’t happen again? Then let’s focus on the big stuff. Okay?”

“Okay,” Mako said, standing up. “I’m going to get coffee.”

“That shit’ll kill ya, you know,” called Zhang, lighting another cigarette.

 

Coffee was a new habit for Mako, who usually preferred tea. But between his restless sleep and desperate need to try and focus, he’d had to turn to something stronger. The brew available in the break room was dreck, but it did the job. Mako stared into the cup of hot, black liquid, tilted it back, and felt the caffeine bathe his brain and quiet the headache he hadn’t even noticed until this minute. 

“Zhang is a lazy shit,” was all he could think. If a case couldn’t be solved in five seconds, he hardly ever wanted to pursue it further. Anything that was hard, anything that demanded extra time or extra effort could be successfully buried in the morass at his desk and conveniently forgotten, especially if it involved people whom Zhang considered less than worthy of his best work. Mako had tried his best to go along and get along, but this was unacceptable. This wasn’t working.

He swallowed the last of his coffee and headed back to the bullpen, noticing that Zhang had deserted his desk. “Figures.” Mako gathered the file for Liu Jie and Xia’s case off the mess and decided that enough was enough. He had to go talk to Bei Fong. 

He knocked on the heavy metal door and heard a gruff affirmative before walking in. The Chief’s office seemed designed to intimidate, all hard surfaces and sharp lines. 

“Make it fast, Mako,” Bei Fong said without even looking up from her work. They’d enjoyed a brief honeymoon period after Mako’s exoneration and promotion, but the Chief didn’t have favorites, and she was sparing with her approval and affection. She also respected seniority, which was why her officers were loyal to her. 

“Look, I know I’m supposed to learn from Zhang, but there’s no other way to say it. He’s letting things slide.”

He handed the case file across the desk, and she took it. 

“He thinks it was a drug deal gone wrong, but nothing adds up.”

“Looks like there isn’t an awful lot else to go on here,” she said.  
“There’s not, but if we dig a little further…”

“Look, Mako, I’m not telling you not to follow up on this case, but this job is about prioritizing, and if Zhang thinks your energies are better devoted elsewhere, then…”

“But how fair is that? If we decide that a murder isn’t worth investigating just because the victims have a record or are addicts or poor…”

“It’s not fair, Mako. Nothing ever is.”

“I know, but…”

“Look, Mako. I know you have almost a dozen cases on your plate, some of them solveable, some of them probably not. Why is this one getting to you.”

The young man crossed his arms again, looked at the floor, and shook his head. “I don’t know. Something about…the way they looked…the way they died. They were in pain, I could tell.”

“Anything else?”

“They have a kid.”

She nodded.

“Listen, follow this one up if you get a lead. Send an officer to talk to the family…or go yourself if you want to. But make sure you do it for the right reasons. And try not to piss these guys off.” She gestured in the direction of the bullpen. “Some people think you have a habit of getting other cops in trouble after what happened with Varrick.”

“Those guys were…”

“Idiots. I know. But don’t get a reputation for going over everyone’s heads. It’s probably bad enough that you came in here to talk about this now. Whatever’s between you and Zhang, you need to fix it.”

He nodded and turned to the door.

“And Mako, I’m not going to be around to back you up for a little while.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m taking some time off. Family stuff. Akihiro’s in charge,” she said, referring to her second in command. 

Mako nodded.

“My advice? Keep a low profile for a while. Between you and the Avatar and you just being…yourself, you’ve been getting enough attention lately. This career lasts a lifetime. That’s a long time to make good, but it’s also a long time to be miserable.”

“Got it.”

In the bullpen, Mako’s exit did not go unnoticed. 

“Talking to the Chief without me?” said Zhang, back from whatever it was he was doing.  
“Just keeping her up to date. You weren’t around.”

“Just doing your little show for her, huh? Since you’re her favorite little turtle duck,” he scoffed.

“You are aware, aren’t you, that just a few months ago, Bei Fong knocked down my door and helped arrest me and throw me in jail.”

Zhang grunted and turned back to his mess, leaving Mako to try, once again, to concentrate.

 

Narook’s was nearly empty when he arrived, the tables cleared of the usual diners, leaving room for a line of regulars at the bar, including a familiar broad back in a green shirt. Mako settled in on the stool next to his brother, who passed him a bottle of something, anything without even meeting his eye.

“You missed her,” he said. “Both of them, actually. It got too late.”

“Sorry.” His tone was clipped. “We got this murder case today, and I had to run it down.”

“Did you solve it, Detective?”

Bolin’s glibness was getting under his skin.

“No. I spent all day knocking on doors, and I got nowhere.”

“You know how poor people are about the police.”

“Yeah, but two people got killed, and they had a family, you know. You’d think someone would give a damn.”

Bolin paused over his drink. “No one did when it happened to us.”

Mako drained his drink and gestured to the bartender for another, which he drained in quick succession.

“You doing ok, bro?”

“Why do you ask?” said Mako, reaching for his third. 

“You’re, uh, hitting it pretty hard, there. And it seems like all you ever do is work.”

“I do other things.”

“Like what?”

He couldn’t think of anything. 

“She asked about you , you know.”

Mako didn’t even have to ask who he was talking about.

“I think that she thinks that you’re mad at her.”

“I’m not mad at her.” He wasn’t. Really.

Bolin pushed a piece of paper down the bar with a phone number on it. “Then call her, and tell her that. She moved into her new place yesterday.”

Mako pocketed the slip of paper, but didn’t say anything. He motioned for another drink.

“Being friends means doing friend stuff. Like going out and welcoming people home. And not turning your brother into a go-between.”

“I had to work.”

“Yeah, you said that.”

 

When Bolin left, Mako promised he was right behind him, but he had a couple or five more drinks before he decided he decided he was just drunk enough to face his empty apartment. But not before making a quick stop. 

Pausing at the first payphone he found, Mako fished drunkenly in his pocket for a handful of coins and had to think hard to find the right denomination.

The coin clinked in the slot, and he lit a fire to help him read the numbers on the scrap of paper, nearly setting it on fire in the process. 

Only when the line on the other end started ringing did he stop to wonder what time it was. Cursing himself, he pulled the phone from his hear a sleepy-sounding, “Hello?”

He froze. As he was struggling to rub two alcohol-impaired neurons together, the voice on the other end said, “Ok, whoever this is, I can hear you breathing, and…”

“Hey,” he stammered out. “It’s me.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Mako, are you ok?”

“A little drunk.”

“Where are you?”

“Phone outside Narook’s.”

“You should go home.”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t have an answer that he felt like giving her. The line was quiet for so long that he was sure she’d set down the phone and walked away. He wouldn’t have blamed her.

“Come over.”

“Huh?”

“Come over, stupid.” She rattled off the address of her ground floor apartment, and the line went dead. He hung up the receiver and stared at the phone, trying to put together what she’d basically just ordered him to do. Pondering the twin possibilities staring drunkenly into the abyss at home and facing his ex-girlfriend, he thought he stood better chances with the abyss. But he had always been a little bit of a masochist. 

The walk to Korra’s apartment was roughly a kilometer by the main roads, but Mako knew how to shave some distance off with shortcuts through a couple of back alleys lit only by the pus-colored light of dying streetlamps. He’d had nearly a lifetime to become accustomed to these streets and was fairly indifferent to any physical danger. But the memory of those two bodies from earlier in the day set him on edge. What is it like to lie in a place like this knowing you’re about to die? The thought came to him unbidden, and as he hastily rounded the corner that would take him in the direction of less haunted places, he nearly crashed into two figures whose questionable location at a questionable hour had all the markings of criminal shenanigans. 

Mako readied himself for a fight, feeling the rush of adrenaline relieve the tedious numbness he’d been unable to shake for the past few weeks. A flame leaped into his palm when the sound of his own name suddenly arrested his movement.

“Mako?”

He blinked, and as his eyes adjusted to the light, two familiar faces came into view. The one who said his name was Viper. The other…

“Officer Huang?”

“Viper, you know this kid?”

“Sure, Mako and I go way back. Don’t we Mako?”

He was still speechless. 

“I was just…on my way home.”

“I thought you lived on the other side of town?” This from the other policeman, whose narrowed eyes and body language revealed precisely how he felt about this interruption.

“How do you know where I live?”

The ensuing silence was broken only by the hiss of a match and the cursory flare of Viper’s cigarette springing to life, and Mako realized he needed to quit asking questions like that and get away. It was bad enough that he’d been recognized and that Huang knew Mako recognized him.

“Kid, you don’t look so hot,” the officer said insinuatingly. “You been out drowning your sorrows?”

“I’m fine.”

“Well, get to wherever you’re going and let me finish questioning this asshole.”

“Hey,” said Viper, a note of offense in his voice. 

“I’ll see you around,” and with that Huang waved him off.

Mako hurried the rest of the way down the alley. He felt almost completely sober, his brain on high alert, though he was trying hard not to go too far down the rabbit hole of interpretations of what he had just seen. After all, he’d gone behind the backs of the police and sought the help of gang members too. And it wasn’t unreasonable to think that maybe there was a perfectly legitimate explanation for a beat cop to be “questioning” a triad member in the middle of the night. Off duty. Out of uniform.

His feet carried him, almost autonomously, to Korra’s doorstep, and when he lifted his hand to knock, his raised hand was trembling. He clenched his fist and tried to take several deep breaths. A cold sweat was beading on his brow. This was such a terrible idea. 

His knuckles barely made contact with the door before it opened. 

“Whoa. You are not ok,” she said, and it occurred to him that he probably should have found a mirror, as if showing up on her doorstep, inebriated and disheveled and still in his work clothes, wasn’t a pretty clear signal that he definitively did not have his shit together tonight.

“Could I get some water?” he gasped. Not the smoothest opener, but his mouth had turned to cotton. The way she looked was not helping, clearly dressed for bed with her hair spilling all over her shoulders and her long legs bare beneath a pair of shorts and an oversized shirt that was probably his. For the first time since he’d known her, he wished for a second that she wasn’t so comfortable with her body. 

She swung the door wide open as she turned to go get him a glass of water, and the hulking form of Naga came into view, curled up in a corner of the main room like any other house pet. The apartment wasn’t quite what he expected. It was smaller than his, for one thing. And for some reason, he had expected boxes, but all he saw was a few pieces of furniture, a couple of water tribe wall hangings and a Fire Ferrets poster that matched the one above his own sofa. She caught him staring at it as she handed him a glass, which he gulped down, muting the bitter taste of adrenaline in the back of his throat. “Present from Bolin,” she said, smiling fondly. “It’s not much, but I really only need it for sleeping, and I don’t have a lot of stuff. 

“It’s nice,” he said, struggling to follow it up with something more substantial, something that would reassure her that he hadn’t lost his mind. She was standing rather close, and the urge to reach out and hold her was intense. His head was light, like he was coming loose from the world and might get carried off into oblivion.

“So what are you doing calling me in the middle of the night?” she asked, tethering him to reality. 

“I wanted to say hi.”

“Well, hi,” she responded bemusedly.

“And to apologize for not being there tonight. I had to work.”

“That’s what Bolin said. You’ve been working pretty hard, huh?”

“Yeah, the promotion…new responsibilities and all…”

“Welcome to my world,” she smirked, and just like that, he was annoyed with her, annoyed that once again she was reminding him that no matter what he did, it would never been as urgent or important as what she did, what she was. And on that point, he knew it was impossible to argue with her. 

So he changed the subject, “You were gone a long time.”

“I had to be where I was needed.”

You were needed here too. He didn’t say it. He never would.

“Do you want to sit down?” she asked, and he gratefully took a spot on the sofa while she settled down on the floor, her back against Naga. 

“I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

“I was awake, actually. I always have a hard time sleeping in a new place.” A quick, unintentional glance toward her open bedroom door revealed sheets askew, a blazing lamp, and a discarded book on the floor. Whatever he did, he had to try hard not to alert her to the fact that his stupid brain was imagining peeling those clothes off of her and pressing her naked body into that mattress, what it would have been like if he had been able to welcome her home as a lover rather than as this weird awkward stranger who showed up drunk and terrified and without anything to say to make it worth her time. He felt childish, like he was trying to avoid being caught picking his nose. 

But she was watching him so carefully from her vantage point across the room, and he felt naked, transparent even, and even though he’d sought this out, he resented her a little bit because of it. 

“What’s wrong, Mako? You’re paler than usual, and that’s really saying something.”

“It’s been a bad day. I’m sorry…I don’t feel like myself.”

“Tell me about it.” At first, it sounded sarcastic, like she was once again measuring the difficulty of his job against her own, but before he snapped back at her, he managed to register the sincerity in those blue eyes and realized that she was truly asking. 

And as if purging the bile that had been rising—for weeks now if he was truly honest—he told her everything. He told her about his problems with Zhang, getting the other officers to accept and trust him. He told her about the dead bodies he’d seen in the morning and how they’d been haunting him all day, how he was seeing first-hand how indifference, incompetence, and resource constraints allowed that sort of thing to happen in the first place. And she listened with a silence that was uncharacteristic of her. He was, perhaps, unprepared for the ways in which she had changed in just a couple of brief months. She was still Korra, still rough around the edges, still not quite aware of the effect she had on him, but she was slower, patient even. 

For a while, she just let him talk even though he could see the urge to respond in the darting of her eyes and the eager shuffling of her body on the floor. Then, though a sick foreboding filled his stomach when he did so, he told her about running into the gangster and the beat officer on his way to her apartment. Her eyes got wide. 

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t think I’m going to do anything. I doubt they were up to anything good, but I have no idea what it was much less proof that anything illegal was happening.”

“But you’re gonna watch the guy, right?”

“If I can, I guess. But what you don’t seem to get is that cops are supposed to stick up for each other. We’re supposed to be team players, and Bei Fong has already made it clear that I have not been doing well in that department already. If I get caught spying on someone…” Years of triad experience had taught him that there was a time to remember and a time to forget.

“What? The other boys at work won’t want to play with you anymore?”

“Don’t do that,” he said. His voice wasn’t raised, but he found himself suddenly on his feet, his hand stretched out as if to hold her off. 

“Mako, this is stupid.”

“No it’s not. Quit doing that. Quit dismissing me.”

“I’m not dismissing you.”

“Yes you are. You do that. You always do that. I have reasons why I do things, Korra, why I think things. I have instincts and I have experience that you don’t have, so quit acting like you know better than me when you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She opened her mouth and closed it again. Then she ran the fingers of one hand through her hair, and Mako immediately wondered if he’d gone too far. It had all just come out, and most of it was true, but “always” was a fighting word.

Instead, she looked from her seated position towards his feet, which were positioned as if he were readying for a blow, and in a quiet voice, she just said, “I’m sorry.”

He slumped back on the sofa again, propped his elbows on his knees and dug the heels of his palms into his eyes, which had long since started to itch with exhaustion.

“Did you feel like that when…when we were together?”

He felt an instant urge to take it all back, but truths that were spoken between them couldn’t be withdrawn, so he nodded. 

“Korra, it wasn’t all like that, not always. I’m tired…exhausted actually. I’m not myself.”

“No, no…” she said. “No…thank you for telling me that.” She finally met his eyes, and he felt that familiar pull between them.

“I really should get going,” he said. “I’m so sorry I bothered you.”

“Mako, I’m here for you whenever you need.”

He tried to believe her. “Thank you,” he said. “Do you mind if I use your bathroom?”

“Go ahead.”

In the tiny bathroom, he splashed water on his face and ran wet fingers through his hair. His eyes were bloodshot, and he knew he would feel like death on toast come starting time a few hours hence. Back in the living room, he caught Korra standing and staring into space, her blue eyes just a little too shiny. 

She walked him the short distance to the door, and as she held it open, she said, “I meant it, you know. If you need help, just ask. I’m doing my best…I’ll try to be a better friend.”

And as if his stupid mouth wanted to make sure he got back on the wrong side of things after his momentary victory, he leaned forward and kissed her, his lips closed and dry but too firm and way too needy. And he felt her hand grasp him by the chin and push him back. When he met her eyes, they were somewhere between anger and pity. 

“Go home, Mako.”

He obeyed. 

 

When Mako awoke, he was on his own sofa, and the sun was streaming in the kitchen window at an angle that told him he had fucked up yet again. A couple hours of rest had turned into several, and he was late. Really late.

He took a back entrance into police headquarters to avoid being seen by too many people, but he quickly regretted that decision when he saw Officer Huang leaning against a wall having a smoke. 

“Getting in late, are we?” the other man said. “Your partner is looking for you. I guess you had a pretty rough night.”

Mako nodded, trying not to meet Huang’s eyes, which made him feel weirdly vulnerable, like he was being sized up by a predator. Without speaking, he went through the door and took the stairs two at a time until he arrived on the fifth floor breathing rather hard. Zhang caught him in the hallway that led to the bullpen.

“Well, look who decided to show up for work.” His tone was ribbing rather than menacing, but Mako still wanted to punch his pockmarked face in a little more than usual.

“I overslept…I’m…I’m…”

“No worries, kid. Huang told me you might have had a late night.” The older detective’s smile set Mako on edge. Why would Huang have told him about last night? 

“And anyway,” he continued. “I clocked in for you, so no one will be the wiser.”

Mako couldn’t do much more than blink as he tried unsuccessfully to piece all of this together in his head.

“You didn’t need to do that. I screwed up. I accept responsibility…”

“Relax. We do this sort of thing around here all the time. We’re all cops around here, and that means we’re brothers. And brothers take care of each other.” Zhang clapped him hard on the back. “So, forget about it, and let’s get back to work.” 

 

The day proceeded pretty much like any other. A fifteen-year old kid reported missing by his mother was tracked to an opium den and placed in lockup for what would likely be a brief stay before returning home. A triad hideout was raided on the suspicion that they were making tar there, but nothing really turned up. And Mako was soon too wrapped up in his job to spend a lot of time thinking about the weird behavior of his colleagues and finally decided that he was grateful that Zhang had covered for him. The last thing he needed right now was to get written up.

Mako prided himself on maintaining a fairly steady equilibrium, but the events of the past twenty-four hours showed just how badly that was slipping. He drank five cups of coffee to cope with the sleep deprivation and the hangover, but the resultant boost in mental acuity meant that his brain kept replaying last night’s mistakes and humiliations over and over and over again. 

One thing was for sure: drinking was out for the foreseeable future, even if that made him seem even more unsociable than he already was. He needed to start taking care of himself, get back into a training routine, go to bed at normal times, quit depending on caffeine, regain his iron discipline. No more dates, no matter how much Bolin harassed him. And at some point, he would apologize to Korra. Again. At some point.

Thinking about these resolutions at his desk as he sorted papers and placed items in the “finished” pile gave him a sense of satisfaction, like he had conquered some part of himself that had become wild. He called Bolin to see if he wanted to meet at the gym he and all the mover actors used—it was a lot nicer than the one at headquarters, and he could use a good spar with his brother, just like in the old days. 

His evening was already coming together much better than the previous one when his eyes fell upon the file for the murdered couple, and Mako was momentarily alarmed at how quickly he had placed that in the back of his mind. The previous night, he’d gone to their last known address (three years old), the address on the man’s ID (old or more likely just fake) and knocked on seemingly every door in between, but not a single lead had turned up. Mako’s eyes fell on the photograph of the bodies one more time, and he checked the clock on the wall to see how much time he had before he was supposed to meet Bolin.  
Time enough for one stop.

 

It was a hunch that took him back to the crime scene, not really knowing what it was he was looking for. It was out of the way, so he had to take the motorcycle for a frigid, windy ride back in the near dark to that squalid hole of an alley where two people had met their untimely end.

Or had they?

When he found the spot, he knelt on the ground, touching the cold paving stones and looking at the cracks in between under the illumination of a flashlight. Not a trace of blood in any significant amount. He pulled the crime scene photo he had filched from the case file from his pocket and held it up to the light. Sure enough.

How had he missed this before? “Spirits, I’m as stupid as Zhang,” he thought while cursing at himself under his breath. Even before he had become a cop, he’d seen men die of knife wounds, and he knew that when you got cut up the way Liu Jie did, there was blood everywhere. There should be spatters, a pool of blood under the body. Unless…

Mako crawled down the alleyway in the direction away from his parked motorcycle. They hadn’t checked this end the previous day. And sure enough, a little blood here, a tiny bit here. Smears, not spatters. These people had been dragged to the spot. They had died somewhere else, likely a few hours before they’d been dumped. What little blood he could see had simply been transferred from their clothes, their skin. He wished he had a camera now, but it was too dark anyway. He’d have to come back the next day and hope it didn’t rain again. 

He was still on his hands and knees, his muttered curses ricocheting off the looming walls and breaking the deathly silence, when he brought his flashlight up, and the beam of light illuminated something that set off a chain of commotion. He saw a face in the murk, a small, dirty face with enormous eyes tucked into a filthy doorway barely two meters from where he was crouching. Mako yelled in surprise, and a garbage can crashed as the figure leapt out of the shadows and went running down the alley, tiny footsteps echoing as they went. 

“Stop!” Mako yelled, regaining his composure, but the footsteps never faltered, beating a rapid pace back to somewhere, and probably not somewhere good.


	3. Chapter 3

As a kid, Mako had been run down by police more times than he cared to count, so it felt strange to be on the other end of the chase. He wondered if any of the officers who had pursued him had marveled at how easy it was for a child to disappear around corners or vanish between bodies on a busy street. His ears were tuned for the sound of tiny boots, his own ringing harshly against the pavement as he came out of the narrow back streets and found himself shoving aside exhausted-looking adults on their way home from jobs that drove them to a premature old age.

The child was a girl, surely no more than nine or ten years old, though malnourishment sometimes made them look younger. He memorized the look of her tangled black hair as he followed her. She was wearing a coat. It was a cheap one but intact, lacking the barely held together look of kids who lived on the streets. Someone was taking care of this one, though probably not well. At least she had somewhere to go. 

She took another sharp turn around one side of a grey tenement building with laundry hanging out of every window. Mako caught up just in time to see her go through a door, and he hesitated before heading after her, feeling a little like a creep despite the badge announcing his right to do so. By the time he entered the building, the child was nowhere to be seen. 

The hallway that stretched out in front of him was dim and smelled sour, like mildew and yesterday’s cooking. Several meters ahead, a woman of indeterminate age in sloppy make-up stood chewing tobacco. She fixed him with a stare that didn’t break for a second as she spat a daub of sickly brown liquid on the ground. Mako pulled himself up to his full height and strode forward.

“Where’d she go?”

“I don’t gotta tell you nothing,” she hissed through rotten teeth.

He continued meeting her stare as he fished around in his pocket and brought out a small wad of yuans. She looked down at them as he grabbed one of her limp, nicotine-stained hands and slapped the bills against her palm. Her eyes rolled, and she gestured in the direction of the apartment across the hall.

Mako nodded and turned to the door, but as he looked at the peephole, he hesitated. “You, knock,” he commanded, looking back to the woman, who spat again before lazily pushing off from the wall. Mako stepped to the side. “It’s Mags,” she yelled, rapping on the door.

The door opened to reveal a woman of about sixty, wizened but stout and powerful-looking. She looked ready to give Mags a piece of her mind when Mako stepped into her line of sight and tried to assume the posture of a cop who wasn’t after any trouble. Once she saw him and his uniform, her scowl deepened, and she exhaled a stream of curses at the other woman, who shrugged and sauntered down the hall, looking for another spot to lean. Looking from one to the other, Mako tried to keep his disgust in check. In spite of or perhaps even because of his past, Mako’s tolerance for creatures like this—ignorant, brittle, just plain mean—had a low threshold. 

“Stupid slut,” she old woman muttered. She looked half-ready to slam the door in his face, but Mako put his hand against it and walked into the tiny, dingy flat. 

“I’m not here to give you grief, ma’am. I just…”

And around the side of a thin, water stained wall, he caught sight of the enormous golden eyes that had scared him shitless in the alley. He pointed.

“I need to talk to her.”

The old woman rounded on the child with fury in her face. “What did you do?” she bellowed.

“She didn’t do anything.” Mako tried to sound reassuring. “I just need to know why she was watching me earlier.”

Swifter than he would have thought possible given the look of her, the woman took two steps and grabbed the little girl by the arm. And as the tiny body jerked forward, another hand came up and slapped her face, hard enough that she would have fallen if she wasn’t being held up.

“Hey! That wasn’t necessary.”

The woman’s rage was turned back on him.

“I won’t have some baby-faced cop telling me how to treat my grandchild.”

“Take your hands off her.” His heart was pounding in his chest, and he was overwhelmed with the feeling that he hated this woman more than anyone else in the world at that moment. He’d been hit by adults before, and he’d felt the surge of impotent fury as he’d sulked away to dream of what he’d do once he learned how to be a better bender. Mako stepped forward so that he towered over her, forcing her to crane her neck as she stared back at him with contempt before shoving the child against the wall. The girl staggered and slumped, and the old woman turned back toward a tiny kitchen, where she resumed the act of cutting up a daikon that looked that it was on the edge of turning rancid. The entire flat smelled of musty rot and the bleach used to try to slow it down. Bare, splinter-ridden floor peeked out from the holes in the worn carpet, and plaster was beginning to peel off the walls and ceilings, but the place was tidy, clean even, no sign of the clutter and mayhem that often ruled in households where kids got beat for bringing home police officers.

Mako held out his hand to the little girl, who allowed him to help her up, staring at him with the needy but distrustful eyes of an animal that’s been mistreated too many times. Kneeling down to her level, he tried to remember what it was like to be ten years old and to fear adults just as much as he hated them. 

“What’s your name?” he started.

He saw her eyes shift left to where she could see her grandmother on the periphery. She said nothing. He tried again.

“What were you doing in that alley when it was already starting to get dark?”

She shrugged. A wayward lock of black hair fell forward into her face as she did so. 

“Those places are dangerous. You know that, right?”

She nodded slowly. Mako wasn’t sure where to go from here. The old woman’s knife fell against the cutting board over and over again, loudly asserting her presence in this encounter even though she had retreated to a corner.

“Candy,” he thought. “I need to start carrying candy.” He remembered half a dozen occasions when he had given up a piece of information in exchange for a hunk of flavored sugar or—if he was really lucky—a sweet roll. 

“You want to see something?” he asked, grasping at straws.

Her eyes got bright, and she nodded. 

“Ok, stand back a little.” She scooted back toward the wall, and Mako held out his right hand. A small flame leaped into it, and the girl startled. “It’s ok,” he said. “When I was growing up, my brother and I didn’t have a home, but there was this guy we did odd jobs for who said he heard somewhere that if a firebender ate his own fire, he could turn into a dragon. Now, I knew that wasn’t true, but he wouldn’t shut up about it, so one day, I told him to try. So, just like I’m doing now, he takes a flame in his hand, and does this…” And with that, Mako raised his hand to his face, opened his mouth wide, and pretended to eat it, extinguishing the blaze as soon as it reached his mouth. And just like the old guy in the story, he screwed up his face dramatically, crossed his eyes, puffed out his cheeks, and held his breath until he was sure he was all red. Then, for the dramatic finish, he went into a coughing, sneezing fit, and streams of grey smoke came pouring out of his nose. 

The little girl let out a brief, shrill laugh before looking to her grandmother and clapping a hand over her mouth, continuing to shake with silent glee. It was such a stupid little thing. He used to do this little performance for Bolin when he was sad, and it never failed to send his little brother into fits, though it always burned the shit out of Mako’s nostrils. He had never done it for anyone else, not even Korra. 

He made a big show of regaining his composure, and the child continued to grin before reaching out her own hand and sparking her own small flame. Mako’s eyes widened in surprise, and he met the girl’s eyes with a look of concern. “You know it’s just a trick, right? I didn’t really eat it.”

She tilted her head to one side and gave him a look that said, “Do I really look that stupid?” And Mako couldn’t help but smile and give her a look of respect. With the instincts of an older brother, he idly reached out and tucked the girl’s hair behind her ear. 

Turning serious, she leaned forward and said in a confidential whisper, “I like to follow people…watch them.”

Mako nodded in understanding. This was a thing some kids did. “Were you following me?”

Her smooth forehead creased, “Not at first.”

“You were following someone else?”

She nodded, and the open gaze she had been wearing started to recede. 

“Have you been to that alley before?”

She nodded again.

“Were you there the night before last?”

She was still, but the look of fear that crept into her face struck Mako cold. 

“Can you tell me what you saw?”

“Ok, that’s enough.” The old woman turned away from her chopping and placed her body in between the two of them. “Get out.”

Mako drew himself up to his full height, trying to assert his authority, which felt less absolute than it should. He wanted nothing more than to lead this girl away from this terrifying woman, to take her back to the safety of the police station where she could pour out the horrible secret of what she’d seen and he could set about making it all right. “Ma’am, I have reason to believe that your granddaughter was the witness to a crime. “

“What of it?”

Her failure to register what Mako thought was an appropriate degree of shock and horror infuriated him. “Two people are dead! She can help me…”

“You must be a pretty shit detective if you need a little cunt like this to help you solve a case.” Flecks of spittle reached his face.

He could hear the strangled sound of crying from behind her, and without warning, the old woman turned back on the girl and leveled her with an open-handed slap. “Shut up!” The girl picked herself up off the floor and ran around the corner, probably looking for some place to hide. 

Mako’s vision nearly blacked out with rage. He had never dreamed for a second that he’d one day have to suppress the urge to firebend at an old woman. He grabbed her elbow and spun her around, trying to impress upon her just how strong he was. “If I ever see you lay a finger on her again, I will end you. Do you get it?”

Her face was defiant. “You think you can scare me? You think this is the first time I’ve been threatened by a cop? This is my family. And you can frankly go fuck yourself.”

He released her arm with a slight shove before digging into his pocket and taking out the crime scene photo. “These two people,” he said. “They had a family too. And they’re dead. I’m just trying to figure out why.”

She turned her hard gaze toward the photo and was silent for a long moment. Mako watched sadness creep into her face before it reverted back to stony contempt. “Those two,” she said slowly, “Got killed because they were stupid.”

“How can you possibly say that?”

“Because this,” her finger jabbed at the image of the dead woman, “Was my fuck up of a daughter. And this,” she pointed at the man, “Was the addict son of a bitch who put that little firebending cunt into her. I know you think you’re going to shock me into cooperating, but you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

Mako’s fingers felt numb as blood rushed to his head. The old woman’s expression was nearly unreadable, but there was a glint in her eye that showed a deep satisfaction at just how boneless she had rendered him.

“What do you know?”

“Only this: they were drug addicts. They were involved with the wrong sort of people. They had a kid they couldn’t take care of, and that’s how I became responsible for making sure she doesn’t end up like them. And now they’re dead.”

“If we could find the people who did this, we could make sure they get justice, make sure she gets justice.” It wasn’t clear whether he was talking about the murder victim or her child.

“Justice? Justice has a funny way of working around here. Maybe you’ve forgotten that, detective. I said goodbye to my daughter a long time ago. Finding out which of the scum you police let run loose in this city killed her isn’t going to bring me a shred of satisfaction. I just want to be left alone, and like fuck am I letting you interfere with my family. So, arrest us or get the fuck out.”

She knew he was impotent. He couldn’t arrest her for being heartless or cynical or even cruel. Even the slapping wasn’t enough until he could get child welfare involved. He returned the picture to his pocket and made ready to leave. “I’m coming back. This is a police investigation. Don’t think for a second that I’m going to let you get in the way.”

Every nerve was alight as Mako walked out of the apartment and away from the building, his rage carrying him swiftly back to his motorcycle—miraculously still where he had left it and not vandalized. This was no longer just a case, just an effort to get justice for two people who, like so many others, seemed destined to fall through the cracks in the system. After all, he had a lead now and an innocent to fight for. This was a fucking vendetta—against complacency, against the moral corruption that comes from poverty, gainst the kind of people who hit kids, against kids watching their parents—even bad parents—die (something he was sure had happened in this case) and no one doing a damn thing about it, not even their own families. It was a mission, a crusade, and righteous hate filled the place deep within him that had been festering with fear and disgust and doubt. 

He knew exactly what he needed to do, but he couldn’t do it until the courthouse opened in the morning. 

 

It was more than an hour after they’d agreed to meet that Mako arrived at Bolin’s fancy new gym, still blazing with resolve and ready to punch the shit out of something. He jogged through the big glass doors and hesitated only for a split second in front of the guard who waved him through. He changed in the locker room before hurrying past the room of barrel-chested men lifting metal barbells and a studio full of people going through bending forms until he reached the big room at the back that was full of mats, barrels of water, and stacks of earth disks. He heard two voices shouting taunts at one another, one clearly his brother’s, and the other…

“Hey, Mako.” Korra barely glanced at him as she effortlessly dodged Bolin’s disk and sent a spiral of air back at him. 

“Hey,” he said, trying to catch his brother’s eye with a look that was somewhere between a question and a glare. Bolin was distracted just long enough for Korra’s next strike to hit him full in the chest, throwing him back against the padded wall with an “oof.”

“What are you doing here?” he asked, turning to her.

“Nice to see you too. Rough night last night, huh?” The acid in her voice wasn’t lost on him.

“I thought you stood me up, bro. And no one at work knew how to reach you.”

“I had to follow up on something.”

“I get it. But the rest of the world goes on even when you’re not here, so I thought Korra might want to beat me up in your place.”

Mako shouldn’t have been surprised, but he felt blind-sided, betrayed even. He wasn’t ready to see her again, not after the humiliations of the previous night. He needed to focus right now. He needed to be steady and stable, and he couldn’t remember a single time in her presence that he hadn’t gone through fourteen contradictory thoughts and emotions in a matter of minutes. 

Bolin, of course, failed to register any of this and quickly set about trying to reassure his older brother that he hadn’t been replaced. “Don’t worry! We can all three train together just like in the old days! Fire Ferrets reunite!”

The fact that Bolin was trying so very hard to get Mako back on friendly terms with his ex—to the point of trying to get him to casually date other women as proof that he was over her already—was as annoying as it was sympathetic and frankly sort of heartbreaking. Bolin depended on the little family Team Avatar had created over the past year, and lately threats to it set him spinning, grappling for a way to hold it all together.

Mako looked at Korra as if to ask if she was ok with this, and she shrugged and smiled like it didn’t matter. It irked him that this seemed so easy for her, and her casualness strengthened the upper hand she had gained when he’d made a complete and utter fool out of himself by showing up on her doorstep reeling with drink and ambivalence.

But if she could do this, so could he. “Ok, great,” he said, trying not to let his grin look forced. “What are we doing?”

“Old rules. I already gave her air, so you get to pick this time.”

This was a game they’d played at the very end of their pro-bending days and even a few times after. It was Korra against the two of them, but she had to stick to one element. At a certain point in her Avatar training, that had become the only way to make it remotely fair.

“Make my day, city boy,” she taunted, arms crossed and smile quirking to the left.

He met her stare with equal defiance. “Fire,” he said, grinning widely. And this time it was sincere.

Two months of uninterrupted police work had cost Mako some flexibility, and for the first few exchanges, he stayed back a bit, letting Bolin take the offensive until he loosened up. While Mako had been neglecting his body, Bolin had clearly made up some of the ground between them. The younger brother’s improved strength and agility impressed him as Mako struggled just to stay out of the way of Korra’s fireblasts, which she lobbed in quick succession while barely breaking a sweat. 

It used to always make him feel more connected to her, the way she defaulted to his element when she fought. But then, at some point, he noticed she’d started to favor air…

Once he’d loosened up a bit, Mako relished the steady burn in his muscles, the rawness in his lungs. With the two of them fighting in tandem, they were able to get Korra on her toes a bit more, make her work a bit harder, but it was shocking how imbalanced they had become, how easy this had become for her. After what he’d witnessed at Harmonic Convergence, this shouldn’t have been a surprise. Her movements were fluid, efficient, powerful but showing barely any evidence of a cost to her body. In the deepest part of himself, he knew things were never as easy as she made them look, but she still seemed in her own way like a distant thing that he could not touch, grand and gorgeous and unremitting. 

But before she could complete the sound kicking of their asses, there was another interruption in the form of Bolin’s new manager looking to talk business. Bolin apologized and asked for five, leaving his brother and his brother’s ex-girlfriend to towel themselves off in awkward silence. Mako tried not to notice her too much. He was embarrassed that hers was the image he still conjured when he had to relieve his sexual frustration in order to relax. That was just fantasy, he could tell himself. He wasn’t supposed to notice the way a real, live Korra stretched her arms over her head, throwing the muscles of her back into relief as her breasts arched forward. He wasn’t supposed to want to catch the sweat dripping down her neck with his tongue or press her against the wall with her legs wrapped around his waist. It felt wrong, disrespectful somehow, when just months ago it had been so natural. He needed to get her out of that place in his head and into a place where they could just be friends. But it wasn’t a switch he could just turn off either. She had never not been attractive to him. 

“So how was work today?” she asked. It was innocent enough, but after the previous night, it felt like dangerous territory.

“I seem to recall that talking about our jobs doesn’t usually work out so well for us.”

She looked annoyed. “I thought the whole point of breaking up was to stop fighting. Is this how things are going to be between us?”

“I don’t know, Korra. Cut me some slack, ok? I’m stressed is all.”

“And you don’t want to talk about it.”

“Not really.”

“Ok, she said. Then fight me for real.” And she assumed a firebending stance. Her eyes dared him to chicken out. 

“You’re on.” He got up, but instead of getting ready to firebend, he assumed a stance for handfighting. “But no bending this time.”

This was also a thing they did, trying to level the ground between them—weaken her obvious advantage—just a little bit more. Feeling weak and childish and unfit to be around her, he needed to regain some small measure of his power. 

So they fought. She was quick and relentless, but he was stable and efficient, and he blocked every blow she threw at him. At one point, he broke her root, and she stumbled back, nearly falling only to use the momentum to power her next strike. 

They settled into a rhythm, trading attacks and blocks without either one trying too hard to win. This was just a workout, after all. “I’ve got a lead in this case I told you about.” Feeling a bit stronger, he offered this small peace offering between wearying breaths. The trading of jabs and kicks had become more of a grapple, him maintaining an iron hold on her left arm while she struggled to either work free or knock him over. Mako tried his hardest not to remember the way this sort of thing had led to sex on a practice mat in the past. 

“That’s great,” she said. 

“It’s complicated though.”

“You’ll figure it out. You always do.” 

This vote of confidence felt a little too good. He was halfway between relishing her approval and hating his childish need for it. Her cutting remarks could hurt, but these gestures of sincere care and kindness—like her apology from the previous night—were worse in a way. Because they made him want, and he couldn’t be doing that right now.

As if she could read his thoughts, she suddenly came back with. “But don’t get too confident, cool guy,” and before he could react, he was on his back, and her right knee was digging into his ribs as she leaned over to taunt him with her sudden victory. Once the air finally re-entered his lungs, he registered the proximity of her body, the way heat wafted off her skin and her breasts rose and fell with each breath, a patch of sweat marking the division between them. 

“Korra, get off me,” he said, feeling desperate. His body was starting to betray him, arousal at her nearness, at the familiarity of this scenario spreading unbidden throughout his body until his dick hardened treacherously inside his pants. 

“Boy, you’re a sore loser.” She didn’t move, still exulting over him, and if she moved too much, she’d figure out what his stupid traitor body was doing, and then what? She’d be angry? Even more disgusted with him than when he tried to kiss her the previous night? 

“I said get off,” and with that, he pushed her, hard, until she rolled off him at an awkward angle. He sat up and made an effort to conceal his little problem. 

“What is your deal?” she said. If the point had been to try to avoid pissing her off, this tactic wasn’t working. He guessed it was better than exposing himself. 

“I can’t do this right now.” He got up and started to gather his things. 

“You’re gonna have to do whatever this is eventually. This is ridiculous, Mako. Why can’t we just be normal?”

He rounded on her, “Because nothing about this is normal.” He wasn’t even sure what he meant by that, but he couldn’t put words to what was burning him up inside. “Give me some time, ok?” he pleaded. “I need time. But until then, maybe it’s best if we don’t see each other for a little while.”

Her face hardened. She had that look she got when she was trying not to cry in front of him, and he felt like absolute shit. But he had to keep his resolve. He was certain this was the right thing to do. He’d focus on his job, on getting his life in order, and then maybe he’d want her less and like her more.

“So what,” she said, a note of sarcasm in her voice. “I get Bolin on odd days or something?”

“Something like that.”

“Fine,” she said. “It’s not like I’ve been the one seeking you out since I got back.” And with that, she turned her back to him and strode out of the training room. On her way she passed Bolin, standing there with the look of someone whose apartment had burned down while he went around the corner for milk. Mako met his eyes and tried to say something, but Bolin just stormed out.

 

A/N: ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?? But really, this hurt like hell to write. I had planned to end this chapter on a different cliffhanger, but these scenes just got too long. Look for another installment soon. There’s a plan, folks. There is a plan.


	4. Chapter 4

Acting Chief Akihiro was not an impressive man. With his nearly bald head, soft face, and dove grey eyes, he lacked Bei Fong’s icy charisma, her ability to control a room merely by being in it. But he wasn’t in the position he occupied for nothing. He was possessed of a relentless pragmatism, a preternatural ability to calculate odds and opportunities. He’d managed to finagle Saikhan’s post-Equalist disgrace into a promotion. There were rumors that he wasn’t above massaging a crime scene to ensure a conviction if he was sure he had his man. There was no emotion in it, no passion, just iron determination to see a thing through.

And that was why Mako felt confident that Akihiro would approve of what he wanted to do as he sat with Zhang on the opposite side of Bei Fong’s giant desk. His partner would be hearing this for the first time too.

“So, your assessment is,” the Acting Chief began. “That the child is a material witness in this case, that she is willing to testify to what she saw, but that the grandmother won’t allow it.”

“Yes sir.”

“And why is she so reluctant—other than the fact that she seems to be a crusty old bitch?”

“I think her relationship with the victims was severely strained, that she resented them and wants the child to forget they ever existed. She wouldn’t even let the kid grieve.”

“Do you think she had anything to do with the murder?”

“There’s no way she could have done it herself, but she resented them, especially the son-in-law.”

“Maybe she had them killed to keep them away from the girl?”

Mako shrugged. “I guess it’s possible. It’s a theory at least. But there is no way the girl will talk unless we get her away from the grandmother. And based on what I saw last night, I don’t think she’s letting that kid out of her sight if she thinks there’s a chance she might talk to anyone about this.”

“Do we have any grounds for suspicion that would allow us to arrest the old woman?”

“No, but she treats the girl pretty badly. I saw her hit the kid so hard it knocked her down. If she’s willing to do that in front of a cop…”

“So, we get child welfare involved…that’s where you’re going with this?”

Mako looked at both men nervously—Zhang had yet to say a word—and nodded. “They might declare her unfit. At the very least, the city will have to investigate and appoint a guardian…”

“That’s legalized kidnapping,” Zhang growled. Child removal policies were fairly new and controversial, especially since it disproportionately impacted poor families, but Mako had never pegged his partner as the type to have an opinion about it.

“But the point is that it’s legal, and it gets us what we need. It gets us our witness,” Mako said, trying to appeal to Akihiro’s preference for ends over means. “And I truly think it’s what’s best for the child.” He cast a glance at Zhang, whose frown lines were deeper than usual. 

“Very well, Detective Mako,” said the Acting Chief. “Get an order from a judge. Arrange with the child’s court-appointed guardian to question the witness.”

“But sir,” started Zhang, whose protest fizzled as Akihiro picked up a telephone, his signal that he was finished with the conversation. 

The two detectives took the hint and left the office. Outside, Zhang turned on him. “You should have told me what was going on before we went in there.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Mako elongated his words, making no effort to conceal his disdain. “I had no idea you gave a damn.”

“I didn’t bail you out yesterday just to have you go to brass about a case without consulting me first. Again.” And with that, Zhang stormed out of the bullpen, never indicating when he’d be back or whether he intended to help Mako follow up on his plan. “Just as well,” he thought. “I can do better on my own.”

 

Getting the court to approve the investigation was simple. He just had to tell a judge that he’d seen the child being mistreated, that he had reason to believe worse was going on behind closed doors. He was a cop, and a celebrated one at that, friends with the Avatar. So, the judge stamped the order and handed it over to the child welfare officer, a woman of about thirty with glasses and shiny black hair pulled into a tight bun. 

She shook hands with Mako. “We’ll conduct the home visit and get back to you by the end of the day. If everything is as you say it is, we’ll remove her. Once she’s settled elsewhere, we’ll arrange for her to be brought to Headquarters for questioning.”

It all sounded awfully clinical. “Questioning” sounded like a rather hostile word, one you used when you were talking about triad suspects, not kids who had seen their parents murdered. He remembered with unease that there was a reason he and Bolin had stayed on the streets rather than letting themselves get swept up by the system. 

The call came at about 5:00. When child welfare officers had arrived, the girl had been locked in her room since the previous night. That evidence of imprisonment plus some yellowing bruises on her arms and chest which they couldn’t prove didn’t come from the grandmother provided grounds enough for them to remove her. 

“Where is she?” he asked the woman with the shiny bun.

“At the children’s home on Kyoshi Avenue.”

Mako balked. “She wasn’t placed with a family?”

“That takes time, Detective. We have limited resources. It’s the best we can do for now until we find a foster home.”

“When can I talk to her?”

“Tomorrow. One of the matrons will bring her by the station.”

“Ok, thanks.” His hand was shaking a bit when he hung up—probably that third cup of coffee. 

 

“Bo, do you remember why we ran away from that kid’s home they put us in after Mom and Dad died?” 

Bolin was still mad at him over Korra, but that didn’t stop him from coming over when his older brother offered to cook dinner.

“Yeah. They were gonna split us up.”

Children in these places were assigned to floors based on age. No effort was made to keep siblings together, even if they were sent to foster homes. 

“Would you have wanted to stay if they hadn’t?”

Bolin was quiet, poking idly at his rice. Mako knew his little brother didn’t remember that stage of their lives very well, and he had always been grateful for that. His original question wasn’t completely honest. Mako had made the decision to leave and dragged Bolin with him. Bolin used to ask him every day if they were going to go back, but gradually he’d come to accept his brother’s way of seeing things.

“I don’t know, but I doubt it. Those curfews and all that marching and shouting. I don’t know if we’d be where we are now…”

“If we hadn’t turned to lives of petty crime?”

“Well, yeah.”

It was an interesting theory, one that Mako liked. It was comforting to believe that his current position was the result of good decisions rather than simply being lucky at critical times. 

“You remember that guy who used to slip us food from that shop when his boss wasn’t looking?”

Mako made a quizzical face. There were big gaps in his memory too, a sixth month period when he was eleven that he simply could not access, events that Bo brought up from time to time that seemed like they were from someone else’s life. 

“No, I don’t.”

“That guy was great.” And he turned back to his food, leaving Mako to wonder what chain of associations led him back to that particular man and where his thoughts would take him next.

Sometimes they had to be each other’s memories. Bolin always remembered the good things while Mako carried much of the unpleasant stuff, though there were things that he would only recall when he caught a particular smell in the air or found himself looking at the reflection of sky in a closed window, caught sight of a yellow coat with blue trim. No version of the past was less true than any other. It just remained in pieces that didn’t quite fit together the way they ought to.

 

_“Did they ever find him?”_

_“Hmm?”_

_“Did they ever find the man who killed your parents?”_

_She only ever asks this sort of question in moments of post-coital lassitude, when he is boneless and too content to fight. She is sprawled on his bed, completely nude, clutching a pillow against her midsection. One leg is tangled in the sheets, and he lies on the other side, watching her watching him._

_“No.”_

_“Do you ever think about it? Don’t you wish they had?”_

_“It wouldn’t bring them back.”_

_“Yeah, but, you know, closure and stuff.”_

_“Are you asking if I ever want revenge?”_

_She nods._

_“All the time.”_

_Her hand ventures over to caress his forehead, run through his tousled hair. They don’t say anything else. His confession hangs in the air, and he wonders what she’s thinking. He thinks maybe there is something broken inside of him, and he wonders if she can tell. He wonders if she can help put the pieces back together again. If that’s even a thing you can ask of a person._

_His hand reaches for hers, and their fingers braid together. He pulls her toward him and tosses aside the pillow that separates their bodies. His leg fits between hers, and he feels warmth, skin still a bit sticky. He makes a pillow of his arm and invites her to nestle there, placing soft, dry kisses along her cheekbone and up to the corner of her eye, which is studying him like a manuscript in some lost language. He wants it to close. He’s afraid she’ll see him. He’s afraid she won’t see him._

_Her mouth finds his and a groan escapes the back of her throat, vibrating from her to him and rocketing down to his core._

Mako always awoke from these reveries with pain in every pore. This had to stop. He’d tried. He’d found a magazine in a drawer that used to be Bolin’s, a magazine that was probably left behind precisely for his benefit. But those women were dead-eyed and too perfect, trying way too hard to be exactly what someone like him wanted. Still, he tried. Tried to focus, but his mind kept wandering back to…

_His body draped over hers strong thighs angling against his hips fingers feathering down his back and clutching at his ass—drawing him closer, deeper—sighs wafting against his face lips softly joining, tongues just barely touching._

_Their second times were always slower than their eager firsts._

_He cradled inside of her, still and calm. His fingers framing her face: “Look at me. See me.” And for a second she does. But then her hips are rocking against him, and they are starting to move together with long, languid strokes, her eyes fluttering shut again, her head falling backward as her mouth forms an “O.” And he can feel himself slipping away._

__

__Mako held his witness’s file in his hands. Name: Jin. Nine years old. Firebender. Began living with her grandmother after both parents went on a particularly bad binge when she was three. The mother tried to contest this once and ultimately gave up. There were photos of the girl’s arms and torso that showed the bruising. He felt angry again and slightly sick. In some families, it just seemed like there could be no happy endings._ _

__

__“Hey, Mako! Heard you got a break in that case you been working on!”_ _

__“Hey, Li,” Mako responded, unable to match the other officer’s level of enthusiasm. “Something like that.”_ _

__“You picking up evidence before you interview your witness?”_ _

__“Yeah.”_ _

__Li was another rookie cop who’d been assigned to the task of guarding the evidence locker after an unfortunate incident where he’d gotten jumpy and wound up severely injuring an unarmed man he claimed had tried to bend lightning at him. The man had been a non-bender. Li had been taken off the street until he learned some self-control or until the neighborhood calmed down, whichever came first._ _

__“Just so you know, I think it’s great that you follow up on stuff like this even when there’s not a lot to go on. Some cops just don’t seem to think it’s worth it.”_ _

__“Thanks,” said Mako, wondering who Li had been talking to. No one particularly liked the guy, partly because he relentlessly trolled for gossip that might help him remedy that fact and failed to recognize just how counter-productive it was. Mako also suspected that he wasn’t above blackmail._ _

__Li smiled at Mako and continued making idle small talk as he tried to unlock the cage. He dropped the keys once and apologized through nervous laughter as Mako bent down to help collect them from the floor. The guy wasn’t a thug, just twitchy as fuck and way too eager to impress higher ranking officers, even those who had a little less time on the force but also happened to have more talent, more luck, and better connections._ _

__Unlocking the door, Li led Mako down the row of shelves to the spot marked with the case number in question. The box containing the evidence was nearly empty. There was the man’s ID, some clothing with blood samples (all, as far as they could tell, from the victims), and…_ _

__“Li, something’s missing here.”_ _

__“Huh?”_ _

__Mako picked up the evidence list and shoved it in front of Li’s face._ _

__“We collected two dime bags of tar at the crime scene. 5 grams each. I brought them here myself. Where are they?”_ _

__Li looked at the list like it was written backwards. He scratched his head, screwed up his face, and Mako wondered how this idiot ever got on the force in the first place. Drugs getting stolen from crime scenes wasn’t unheard of—some cops had a taste or whatever—but disappearing from the evidence room indicated a special level of brazenness on the part of the thief and a special kind of incompetence on the part of Li—if he hadn’t taken it himself._ _

__“I…I,” Li stammered stupidly. “Maybe it fell behind the shelf or something?”_ _

__Mako rolled his eyes. “The tar’s been stolen, Li. Who’s been in here in the last few days?”_ _

__“Fuck, Mako, everybody. You know how this room is. I don’t know who would have taken it? And surely you don’t think I…”_ _

__“Go check your log.”_ _

__“You think someone logged it out?”_ _

__“Just go check.”_ _

__Mako followed Li back to his desk, seething. Junkie cops were bad enough, but this was his case they were fucking with._ _

__Li flipped through his log book, scanning for the characters that matched the box in question. He went back a day, then another, and…_ _

__“Ah ha!” he said. “Morning before last. Someone came in and logged out evidence from that box.”_ _

__“Who was it?”_ _

__Li took his finger and scanned across the row. He froze. “It…”_ _

__Mako grabbed the book and flipped it toward himself._ _

__“It was…you?”_ _

__Sure enough, there was his name. Li looked bewildered, shaky._ _

__“That’s impossible,” Mako said._ _

__“That’s what it says.”_ _

__“I know what it says. It doesn’t make any sense.” Mako counted back: “Let’s see, yesterday I talked to Akihiro and child welfare and the judge. The day before was the day I went to the apartment, and in the morning…shit.”_ _

__“I wasn’t even here two mornings ago. I…” he stopped, heart beginning to beat a panicky staccato. But my time card will say I was here._ _

__“Maybe you forgot?”_ _

__“Right, Li,” he replied sarcastically. “Maybe I forgot.”_ _

__“It happens sometimes, Mako. You check out evidence, and then you get wrapped up in something else, and before you know it…”_ _

__Mako slammed the log book shut. “That’s not what happened. I’ll get to the bottom of this,” he said, turning to leave. He stopped at the door. “Do me a favor?”_ _

__“Anything.”_ _

__“Don’t mention this to anybody…not yet at least.”_ _

__“No worries, Mako. I’ve got your back.”_ _

__

__Mako was seething. In a matter of seconds, he was able to narrow the list of possible suspects down to one. He checked Zhang’s usual spots—the lunch room, the spot outside where he liked to smoke. His desk, of course, would be the last stop. Finally, he spotted him in a corridor near the interrogation rooms, and before the other man could breathe a word of protest, Mako hauled him by the collar into one of the observation booths. The room on the other side of the two-way glass was empty._ _

__“So, what’s the plan here, Zhang?” he asked, not even giving the older cop a chance to recover._ _

__“The fuck are you talking about?”_ _

__“The drugs we collected from the crime scene the other day are missing. Someone made it look like I checked them out two mornings ago, when you and I both know I wasn’t here.”_ _

__Zhang was nonplussed. “That ain’t what your time card says.”_ _

__“Yeah, and you’re the one who clocked me in.”_ _

__“No idea what you’re talking abou…”_ _

__“Don’t fuck with me!”_ _

__“Yeah, yeah. Ok, kid. It ain’t that big a deal. The drugs are safe. I was just taking out a little insurance is all.”_ _

__“Insurance?” Mako was incredulous._ _

__“Yeah.” Zhang straightened up, crossing his arms defensively. “I don’t trust you. You’ve got no sense of loyalty to your brothers here.”_ _

__“That’s insane.”_ _

__“I ain’t the only one who thinks so. Some of these guys got spooked after you go Lu and Gang fired.”_ _

__“That was their own fault. They were ignoring key evidence…”_ _

__Zhang didn’t lose a beat. “Yeah, but some of these guys think you went out of your way to make them look bad. Just the other day, Huang came to me paranoid as fuck because you saw him shaking down a low-life, and he thought you might tell someone and make it look like something shady was going on.”_ _

__“That was the least…”_ _

__“…and there’s you and me. You’ve been boxing me out, talking shit to the Chief, trying to get me fired or reassigned or something, I’m sure. So long as you got the ear of the brass, I figure I and fellas like Huang might as well have some…”_ _

__“…blackmail material?”_ _

__“It ain’t like that.”_ _

__“Then tell me what it is like?”_ _

__“You play nice, be loyal, and none of this comes out.”_ _

__“Except I was just down there, and now Li knows the drugs are missing.”_ _

__The sound that came out of Zhang’s mouth next was somewhere between a laugh and a grunt. “I caught Li balls deep in that hooker we had in lockup last week. Li’s mine. He’ll be deaf, blind, and mute whenever I need him to.”_ _

__“So you’ve got dirt on everyone, huh?”_ _

__“Not exactly.”_ _

__“This is ridiculous, Zhang. We need that evidence. This is an open case.”_ _

__“Says you.”_ _

__“Says the witness I’m about to go interview.”_ _

__“You don’t know what that kid actually saw or even if her memory is trustworthy. Plus, you’ve been fucking with her family. You honestly think she won’t be sore about that?”_ _

__“That old lady was hitting her.”_ _

__“Yeah, and so did my old man—on the regular. Didn’t mean I wanted to wind up in one of those hell holes where they stick orphans and other trash.”_ _

__The insult wasn’t lost on Mako, but it was the least of his worries._ _

__“Just tell me where the drugs are, Zhang.”_ _

__“Only if you ask nice.”_ _

__“What do you want?”_ _

__Zhang looked at Mako like he had him exactly where he wanted him, like he’d played this just exactly right._ _

__“You let me interview that witness.”_ _

__Mako’s head was spinning as he tried to put this together. “Why?”_ _

__“Because.” Zhang shrugged and smirked._ _

__“It’s my witness. My case…”_ _

__“Our witness. Our case. Or did you forget we was s’posed to be partners?”_ _

__Zhang wasn’t wrong that the situation with the girl was delicate, and Mako quite simply did not trust his partner not to fuck it up in the interview room. He’d seen Zhang in plenty of touchy interrogations, and his bedside manner left something to be desired. Plus, he was just such a piece of shit…_ _

__“I need this, kid.” The older man lowered his voice and leaned in confidentially, like he was confessing something reluctantly. “I still think you’re chasing your tail, but if you’re right, and it turns out the old lady did have them killed or if something else is going on, then I need to look like I did my share.”_ _

__Mako hesitated for a long moment. Zhang had some points, but it still all felt like manipulation, and it just wasn’t in him to surrender._ _

__“No deal.” Mako tried to keep his face unreadable, casual, like none of this was really affecting him. “Honestly? This is the sloppiest attempt at blackmail I’ve ever seen, and I worked for some pretty dumb gangsters back in the day. I will interview the witness, and you can watch from this room. And you can go to brass with your little story about how I stole drugs from the evidence locker and was stupid enough to sign it out, and we’ll see how far it gets you.”_ _

__Zhang’s face got dark again. “You are making a huge mistake.”_ _

__“It’d be a big mistake to let you jeopardize this case any further by letting you jerk me around like this.”_ _

__Zhang’s scowl deepened, his pockmarked skin reddening in places, throwing bleached white scars into sharp, ugly relief. “You think you’re so much better than me. Than all of us, just because Bei Fong has a soft spot for you now and lets you do whatever you want. Just because you stuck it to the Avatar…”_ _

__He barely got the last syllable out before Mako’s fist connected with his nose. Zhang stumbled back, and Mako stepped toward him, towering over him as the older cop wiped at a trickle of blood under his nose, trying to clean it up but inevitably just smearing it on his upper lip. Mako fished in his jacket pocket for a handkerchief, which he threw at his partner. He was still seeing white, but he did his best to keep his breathing in check, to appear as calm and menacing as possible._ _

__“Here is what you’re going to do. You’re going to clean yourself up, and then you’re going to get yourself to Akihiro and tell him you want a reassignment, effective immediately. We’re done.”_ _

__“What about the drugs?”_ _

__“You’re going to put those back in the evidence locker, and we’re going to forget about this.”_ _

__He turned on his heel, not even bothering to look behind him as he left the room and walked back toward the bullpen. He had fifteen minutes before the interview. His pace sped up to a jog, and once he got back to his desk, he hastily went through his drawers, looking to see if the drugs had already been planted there, suspecting that Zhang had already set that little time bomb ticking in spite of all this “insurance policy” talk. Coming up empty, he then moved to Zhang’s desk and picked through the mess. With a brief glance upward, he caught another cop watching him.“What?” he said, almost looking for another fight at this point. The other guy shrugged and turned back to his paperwork, and Mako took an entire desk drawer and emptied it out. Nothing._ _

__“It was worth a shot,” he thought._ _

__Next, he jogged down to the locker room, where he looked through every pocket of his extra jacket and overcoat and rifled through some dirty gym clothes he’d been meaning to take home. Again, nothing. He was about to leave for the interview—already a few minutes late—when he saw Zhang’s locker , hesitated, and then went back to his own for the pick and torsion wrench he kept there, just in case. He was in the middle of cracking the lock, deep in concentration, when he heard…_ _

__“Mako?”_ _

__Fucking shit, Li._ _

__Li looked at him quizzically, and Mako marveled at the unlikelihood that Li would find him compromised like this twice within the same couple of hours._ _

__“Hey, what’s up?” he asked, trying hopelessly to act natural._ _

__“My shift is over…what are you…”_ _

__“Nothing,” Mako said, rising and making to head out the door. He wasn’t even going to try to explain this one. “Nothing.”_ _

__

__This was hardly the best state of mind in which to interview a witness, especially a child witness, but he’d have to find a way to get a grip. He stopped for a second in the hall that led to the interrogation rooms and leaned against a wall, shutting his eyes, counting his breaths and trying to imagine that his emotions were a bright ball of flame that he could control with the rhythm of his lungs._ _

__“It’s an airbender meditation thing that Tenzin taught me. I’m not very good at it, but…”_ _

__Her cool, calloused hand against his skin, him matching his breath to hers. His eyes closed, her ear settling on his chest. “I can hear your heartbeat slowing down.”_ _

__Feeling his sense of control and equilibrium returning, he pushed off from the wall, straightened his uniform, and walked around the corner to see Officer Huang and a couple of beefy cops he didn’t recognize standing in front of the door he was supposed to be going into._ _

__“Hey, I’ve got a witness waiting for me in there.”_ _

__“Oh?” said Huang. “You sure about that?”_ _

__“Yeah…the fuck is going on?”_ _

__“Your partner is in there interviewing somebody, but he didn’t say anything about waiting for you. In fact, he told us not to let anyone else in.”_ _

__He looked at Huang, bewildered, the panic and anger starting to creep up inside of him again. He opened the door to the observation booth and, sure enough, through the window he could see Zhang sitting across from a frightened-looking Jin. A woman with graying hair sat dozing in the corner. It took Mako, feeling like he’d just been run over by a Sato truck, almost a full minute to realize that he wasn’t alone. The stern, inscrutable face of Akihiro materialized, half in shadow, half illuminated by the light from the interview room._ _

__“Hello, Detective,” he said._ _

__Mako turned to see Huang and the other muscle looking in the doorway, smirking at him._ _


	5. Chapter 5

The sound of Zhang ticking off routine questions—name, age, background, etc.—wafted through the speaker system, and Mako struggled mightily to focus on the voices as his attention was pulled apart by various unanswerable questions about just how things had so rapidly gone sideways. 

The Acting Chief’s staid intonations intervened to tether him to the moment even as they drew him further into what felt like another reality. “I want to thank you for your assistance in this case, Detective. But I believe your partner and I will take it from here.”

“Why?” he asked, fighting the dryness in his mouth. His adrenaline was spiking for the nth time that day, and incoherent fury was threatening to overwhelm him. Akihiro’s calm only served to exacerbate the problem.

“I have some concerns about you.”

“Whatever he told you…” Mako gestured violently in the direction of the interview room.

“He didn’t tell me very much. But this…lone wolf tendency of yours…running off to investigate cases in your off time, chasing little kids down back alleys, coming in with plans your partner doesn’t know about. I have to admire your ambition. Detective at only 19. But you are aiming to self-destruct if you keep this up.”

“It’s not ambition. It’s…”

“…oh justice, honor, protecting the innocent. You’re incorruptible, right?”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

Akihiro just looked at him. The hairs on the back of Mako’s neck started to prick up. There was something indefinably sinister about this whole thing. He tried not to meet his superior’s eyes by staring hard through the glass, observing Jin, who seemed small and pale to the point of translucence under the harsh lights. Zhang showed her pictures of her parents—three-year old mug shots, thankfully, not the ones from the crime scene—and the girl fidgeted and licked her lips over and over when she was asked to identify them.

“You saw your parents die too, didn’t you? Had to sit in a room like this once, I bet. I wonder if the officer who took your testimony is still here. Do you remember who it was?”

Mako shook his head, consciously lying. He had never seen her again, but he remembered everything about that officer and her short, coal-black hair, her clumsy manner around him, her constant apologies—“I’m sorry we have to do this but could you just, please just repeat, tell me again I’m sorry I don’t want to have to…” There were details—like the weird water stain on the ceiling in the room he’d sat in for three hours or the cracked skin around the officer’s fingernails as she flipped through pages in a file—that he remembered even more vividly than any part of his parents’ murder. 

“I read over that case file, you know. It seems you were no more help as a witness than I expect this one will be. Children’s memories…so rarely reliable.”

Fists clenched, Mako forced himself to stare at the back of Zhang’s square head, willing away the memory of himself on one side of a partition like this looking at a line-up of suspects and “I don’t know…maybe that’s him…I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.” Why didn’t I get a better look? 

“Is that why you’ve pursued this case so single-mindedly? Are you trying to get justice for yourself here?”

Again, Mako refused to answer. Just because Akihiro wasn’t completely wrong didn’t mean he wasn’t fucking with him. 

From the interview room, Mako could hear Zhang ask Jin to recount her memory of the night her parents died. Some details emerged that Mako expected—she followed her parents sometimes, wasn’t allowed to see them, just curious. And then there were the ones he did not expect—she’d seen them go to that alley before to hand off bags of things for money. Sometimes they would meet a man who would tell them what to do—bring this here, drop this off there, don’t fuck up this time or I’ll make sure you never get high in this city again, etc., etc. And finally, there was the stuff that just didn’t make sense—that night, she recounted, they had met two men, and there had been a fight. One burned them, the other cut them up with a knife. She’d waited for them to leave and then ran ran ran, hid under her bed until the next morning, went back the following night because she couldn’t quite remember if it had been real or not. 

Mako had never told anyone that he suspected the bodies had been moved, never gone back to the crime scene with a camera, never written it in the case file. He’d been distracted by the kid and the chase and the apartment and that horrible old woman. But he suspected that if he had reported it, that detail would have found its way into what was more and more feeling like a performance staged for his benefit. Either his interpretation of the crime scene was wrong or he was going crazy or there were holes in Jin’s testimony.

And as if Akihiro was looking through another window into his head, the older man intoned, “I’m sure you’re aware of how an officer can taint an interrogation.”

“ ‘Interrogation’ is a strong word to use with a nine year old orphan.”

“A slip. Forgive me. But all the same. An interviewee—especially a sensitive one—often wants to please, and they can sense which answers will please you. Thus, it’s best if you keep…emotion, shall we say, out of it. This is why I wanted your partner to conduct this interview. I fear it may be impossible for you to be impartial in this matter.”

Mako nodded, trying his to look like a person who is happily swallowing bullshit like it’s a fine dessert. The interview progressed, and Mako felt a surge of hope when, as if in contradiction to Akihiro’s assertion that this exercise was pointless, the girl began to describe the men who had killed her parents. 

“We should get her a mug book,” he said, and Akihiro nodded to one of the cops in the doorway, who obediently went to retrieve one. 

The Acting Chief was nonplussed, though he smiled cloyingly at Mako and said, “Maybe we’ll get lucky.” Mako wasn’t sure what lucky meant for each of the players in this scenario.

It took hours for Jin to page through the mug books while Mako stood cracking his knuckles and accepting offers of coffee. Akihiro mostly kept quiet, thumbing through files and listening to things whispered in his ear by officers coming in and out of the observation room, and for that Mako was thankful. He watched what was happening in the room beyond as if it were happening a thousand miles away. He felt remote, detached. He thought of Korra’s spirit leaving her body and entering the spirit world, and he wondered if this is what it felt like. Of course, when it had happened to her she probably hadn’t felt this ineffectual, this helpless.

The matron from the children’s home fell asleep in her spot, and Zhang was only roused from a bored, impatient stupor when Jin began to stare at a picture rather intently. “This was the guy?” said Zhang. 

She paused, blinking for a while before finally nodding. “That’s the one who firebended at them.”

“Ok, ok. Good kid. Now what about the other one?”

It took a little while but not as long before she settled on another photo. “That’s the one with the knife.”

 

They ran sheets on the two guys Jin had ID’d. As it turned out, the one she said was the firebender was actually a non-bender and vice versa, but everything else seemed consistent. Pretty much, at least. Both had multiple drug arrests, known associates who were gangsters, though nothing on their rap sheets pointed to violence. Zhang attributed this sudden escalation in criminal activity to tar, which “makes you crazier than a fucking mongoose-bear.”

“Are you satisfied, Detective Mako?” asked Akihiro, five other cops staring at him like everything depended on how he answered this question. 

Mako nodded, not sure what else to do. “I want to collar these guys myself.”

Zhang started to protest. Akihiro raised a hand, “You can go along, Detective. But keep your emotions in check. I’d hate to see this case get compromised by sloppy police work.”

As they turned to leave, Mako felt Akihiro’s hand come down on his shoulder. He turned to face the Acting Chief, whose smile was insipid and artificial. “Don’t worry so much, young man. If all goes well, you may very well get your chance to find justice, revenge even. Just be careful.” The place where his superior’s hand withdrew felt like it was coated in a layer of slime.

 

Outside, in the crisp evening air, Mako and Zhang huddled next to a squad car with two other teams of officers who would go search the neighborhood for their suspects. A metalbender airship would patrol nearby in case they needed back-up. To Mako, this all seemed a little grandiose for what should have been the routine arrest of two addicts, violent or not, and he had to weigh his relief that the case was finally being taken seriously with his suspicions about how much attention it was suddenly getting. He wasn’t at all convinced that Jin’s testimony was true, that it was even her own. His one hope was that the suspects would provide new information, even if it disproved the current theory of the crime. 

Zhang laid a map on the hood of the satomobile and pointed out the streets each team would cover. Mako barely listened, staring at the diagram until the lines of it lost coherence. The edges of his vision kept narrowing, and the voices kept receding into some intraversible distance. Though it was cold outside, his body felt hot, his skin sensitive. 

“Give me a second,” he said, interrupting Zhang mid-drone. His partner waved him off without stopping, and Mako walked around a corner to try to recover himself. He leaned his forehead against the cool stone wall and once again tried to count his breaths, fighting off a feeling of helplessness he’d only felt a few times before. It made no sense, but he felt like he was being pinned to the floor with bloodbending all over again, invisible restraints keeping him down while he watched her… But there was no masked man here, nowhere to locate the source of his unease. It was like a terrible smell that you couldn’t place. You could try to cover it up, but the source of the rot would still be there, waiting. 

The impact of something dull and hard against his shoulder broke him out of his daze, and he turned around suddenly to see someone running at him, eyes ablaze, hand letting loose the next rock intended for his head but going wide. After a few seconds of confusion, Mako recognized the face of Jin’s grandmother, red and distorted with rage, and he stood motionless as she hurled herself at him, tearing at him with bared nails. 

“YOU!” she screamed. “You did this! You gave her to them!”

Mako was speechless, throwing one arm up to protect his face and trying to grab at her with the other. 

“You shit! Why couldn’t you just leave us alone…we didn’t want this…we didn’t need…”

The cops who were gathered around the corner suddenly appeared. Mako just stood there as she was restrained, registering the anguished look in the woman’s face, the tears that cut tracks across her cheeks, her mouth gaping as she screamed impotent profanities. The words barely registered to Mako as words. 

“It’s his fault! It’s HIS fault! We did EVERYTHING! Everything we were supposed to…”

“Shut her up.” Zhang’s voice came from over Mako’s shoulder. A hand clapped over the woman’s mouth as she was knocked off her feet. 

Zhang walked up and smacked a hand on his partner’s back. Mako flinched at the impact, feeling skinless and raw. “What a shame” was all he said. 

The old woman was clapped into handcuffs and informed that she was under arrest for assaulting a police officer. She was pinned to the ground, still struggling, dirt from the pavement covering one side of her wrinkled face. In the arms of two officers twice her size, she looked impossibly fragile, and some part of Mako wanted to intervene, wanted to say it was fine, that he understood, that it was really his fault and they should let her go. He wanted to release her and ask her what she meant, if she knew why all of this seemed so wrong. But the rest of him was still paralyzed, was replaying the memory of her hand raised against a child who didn’t fight back. And in the moment, he was able to once again redirect all of his anger, all of his frustration back towards her. “If nothing else is going right, at least she is getting what she deserves.”

He kept watching as she disappeared with the officers until Zhang pulled him back around the corner and into the cruiser, which was musty and stifling inside. He rolled down the window just to keep himself from throwing up. 

 

It was well into the night when another team of officers radioed in that according to locals, the suspects were holed up in a squat on Badgermole Way. Zhang flipped on the lights and sirens, and Mako steeled himself as they swerved through traffic, the lights of the city flashing past and finally darkening as they ventured deeper into one of its worst sections. 

In moments, six officers were assembled near a condemned building that, but for a few faint lights through a boarded-up windows—looked like it hadn’t been inhabited for years. 

“I’m going in,” said Mako in a voice that brooked no dissent as he quietly shut the door of the cruiser. He needed to get to the suspects and start asking questions before anyone else could intervene and spin everything on its head again.

“Suit yourself,” said Zhang. “Huang goes with you.” 

Mako’s word of protest was ignored. He looked back at the insipid face of what he was now sure was a dirty cop and was met with a smirk. “I’ll make sure the rookie doesn’t screw up,” Huang said. Then, adopting a serious look , “Don’t worry, kid. I’ve got your back.”

Zhang took three other officers to form a perimeter around the building, making sure no one escaped out a side exit or a window. Huang made sure his flasks of bending water were topped off. 

One step inside told both cops that this was a drug den. It reeked of filth, of human beings dying in pieces. Mako peered into one room to see three or four people piled into a corner, breathing shallowly under the influence of opium or some other narcotic. In another spot, a man was shaking and talking nonsense to himself, and by the light of the fire he carried in his hand, Mako could see the places where the man had picked at the skin on his arms until it bled, one of the more unpleasant effects of tar. 

The building was large enough that Mako knew they could spend the whole night searching. Up a flight of stairs, he saw a man and a woman huddled together. The latter looked like she was semi-lucid, and Mako shoved the photos of the suspects toward her face and brought his fire near, casting a menacing light on everything around them. She stared back at him, and Mako saw her gaze fall on his uniform, terror registering in her eyes. She gestured down the hallway toward a closed door. As he nodded and stepped away, she started to poke and tug at the man next to her, trying to get him to wake up and leave. Mako turned and placed a finger to his mouth, commanding her to stay quiet. 

What happened next happened fast:

Out of the corner of his eye, Mako was almost certain—but couldn’t be sure—that he saw Huang kick the man on the ground as he strode by. The man awoke, still in the grasp of some appalling nightmare, and a blood-curdling scream erupted from his throat. Beyond the door Mako was approaching, came the sudden sounds of people scrambling. 

“Wait!” Mako said, but Huang ran past him, yelling “Republic City Police!” In a half second, the door was kicked in, and Mako heard the whizz of a knife, a cry of pain, and the dull *thunk* of a blade embedding itself in wood. He crouched against the wall next to the doorway, looking back toward where Huang was bleeding from a gash on the side of his head and sending water whips back at his assailant. Erratic fire attacks managed to keep him at bay. 

“Stop!” Mako yelled impotently, knowing that at this point, they should be trying to de-escalate and get the suspects to surrender. But Huang showed no sign of letting up, and the situation was so badly out of control that it looked like there was no possible hope of salvaging it. Mako yelled into his radio for backup, and as he did so, he saw the edge of the rug in the hallway ignite and knew that the entire place could go up in smoke before the other officers could reach them.

Taking a deep breath, he stepped away from his cover and sent a bolt of lightning arcing toward the firebender in the room beyond. His control was superb, perfectly calculated to knock the man out, but not to kill him. But what Mako didn’t know, couldn’t know was that just behind his target was a poorly sealed container of fuel for the nearby stove. The resultant explosion was small, just enough to send both cops hurtling backward against the opposite wall of the corridor. But when he recovered himself, Mako saw the light of a blazing fire and heard the piercing sound of two men screaming in agony, his eyes coming to focus on the ghastly vision of two human figures burning, burning, burning like torches.

Mako grabbed a stunned Huang by the shoulder. “Put them out put them out put them out!” he screamed, but the waterbender just stared back at him—his face an inscrutable mix of fear and resolve—before shaking out of his grasp and tearing back down the hallway. 

After a moment of trying his best to subdue the flames with firebending, Mako gave up and followed, screaming at the people downstairs to get out. Many of them didn’t even flinch. 

Outside, the cold air greeted his smoke-seared lungs, and Mako put his hands on his knees, hacking and spitting up gobfuls of blackened mucus as human figures stumbled out of the building behind him. Huang was nowhere in sight. In the far distance, Mako could hear sirens and the sounds of water tankers converging on his spot as behind him, flames ignited the roof of the condemned tenement and reached toward a starless sky.


	6. Chapter 6

Hot coffee seared Mako’s painfully raw throat, but he was too exhausted to care, just trying to keep it together long enough to get through the debriefing. It had been held off until morning so that the wounded could receive aid and the ashes could be picked through for evidence. Mako had been sent home and ordered to rest after receiving the cursory attentions of a healer who had people in far worse shape to attend to. Survivors from the building who were still ambulatory had split, naturally. All that was left was a half dozen people with severe burns and likely several others among the wreckage who weren’t even that lucky.

Zhang had been surprisingly consoling, almost as if he had forgotten their confrontation from earlier in the day. “It was an accident, kid. We all know that. We’ll stick up for you. We’re brothers, remember?” But Mako had shrugged off these attempts at comfort (if that’s what they were) and had tried to get a good look at Huang, who refused to meet his eyes. 

Zhang had gone back and forth between the two of them, “getting the story straight.” 

“He kicked a guy, and the guy started screaming,” Mako had said. “That’s when it all went to shit.”

“It was an unfortunate accident. That’s all,” his partner kept saying, then, turning a shade more sinister: “You don’t bring that shit up, and Huang don’t say nothin’ about you throwing lightning inside that tinder box.”

“I was trying…”

“I know, kid. Accident.”

At home, Mako didn’t sleep a wink, spending the entire night coughing and trying to write out every single thing he remembered, attempting to sort out what had actually happened from the version Zhang had managed to convince everyone was true. The look in Huang’s eyes before he’d split haunted him. Did he really just bug out because of fear? Or did he let those men die like that? Was this, he shuddered to think, exactly what was supposed to happen?

Agitated and sleepless, Mako had tried to call Bolin, who hadn’t answered. Then in desperation, he’d dialed another number, which had stayed in his pocket the entire week. He’d taken it out several times intending to incinerate it, but…

“Hello?” said a sleepy voice. 

He stayed silent, putting a hand against his forehead and trying not to breathe too loudly.

“Look, Mr. Hat Trick, one more of these…”

He hung up. What a terrible idea.

There was no avoiding the suspicion that the entire day’s had been one continuous mindfuck. There was Jin’s questionable testimony, the speed with which the two suspects had been revealed, then found, and then eliminated before they could be questioned. Zhang had already tried to set him up and then done a miraculous about-face hours after Mako had bloodied his nose. Was it because he had gotten what he wanted? Was he laying low until a more opportune moment? And all the while Akihiro had been pushing his buttons, creating precisely the kind of situation in which Mako might lash out violently against the men suspected of killing two people in front of their child. And everyone, he thought ruefully, would believe that he had done it deliberately. \

After a night spent convincing himself that he was being set up to take a big fall—a set up he had all too willingly walked into—he was surprised, relieved even, to hear the Acting Chief begin the debriefing with the words, “Well, this was unfortunate, gentlemen, but everything I’ve seen and heard points to this being an accident. That building was primed to go up at any moment.”

Mako’s brain started to buzz, and he almost flinched when Zhang’s hand landed on his shoulder, a heavy reminder of how they’d all agreed to back each other up the night before. Perhaps he’d actually been sincere. Once again, Mako tried to catch Huang’s eye, but the other cop continued to look straight ahead, his face unreadable.

“Are you all right, Detective Mako.” Akihiro’s voice brought him back to attention. 

“Fine.”

Turning back to the file in front of him, the Acting Chief kept going. “In any case, you all found precisely what was expected: a firebender and a knife fighter. One of the weapons recovered at the scene is most likely the one used in the murder. Between that and the child’s testimony, I think we can officially call this case closed.” As if to demonstrate just how closed it was, he flipped the front cover over and brought the flat of his palm down hard, smiling with satisfaction. 

And then he did something that Mako couldn’t quite believe. He stood up from his chair and began clapping, and the rest of the room quickly followed. The people present applauded and shook each other’s hands, reveling in a job well done. In the midst of the celebration, Akihiro reached out a hand to Mako, who stared back in confusion before taking it. 

“Excellent work, son. I’m glad to see that you have the maturity to swallow your pride and follow your partner’s lead.”

Mako blanched at the familiarity but tried not to show his discomfort. As the rest of the cops began filing out of the office, Mako leaned forward. “Sir, I was wondering if I could talk to you for a moment.” Sweat began to bead on the back of his neck.

“Make it quick. I have somewhere to be.”

He licked his cracked lips and tried to clear his dry throat, searching for the right words. The effects of smoke and sleep deprivation made his brain feel like a wrung-out sponge. 

“Sir,” he began before pausing for another beat. “Sir, I have some reasons to think that we should keep this case open and continue investigating.”

Akihiro’s face darkened, his easy smile disappearing. “And what exactly are those, Detective?”

“Well…” He didn’t know where to start—his suspicions about the crime scene, his distrust of the witness he’d bent over backward to procure, Huang’s sketchy behavior, Zhang’s duplicity. Or the fact that he still couldn’t figure out why two junkies as hard up as the men he’d seen in that place would kill two people—ostensibly over drugs—have enough time and wherewithal to move the bodies and fail to retrieve the drugs. None of it made sense, but he couldn’t decide which card he ought to play first and which ones ought to be kept in reserve. His experience with Varrick had taught him not to reveal everything you knew all at once.

“Detective, I know this case has been hard for you. And I know that you are shaken from what happened last night, but the testimony and the evidence we have before us is abundantly clear. It’s time to let this go.” As he said this, Akihiro stepped out from behind his desk, arms crossed behind his back. And even though Mako had a few inches on him, he suddenly felt small in the man’s presence. 

Mako swallowed hard. “I have some…doubts. I suspect that some of the evidence we have can’t be trusted.”

The Acting Chief continued to stare him down, anger flashing in his eyes before softening.

“I’m disappointed, Mako. I thought after our talk yesterday that you would comport yourself with professionalism from here on out. But it appears that your…emotions are continuing to get the better of you.”

“I…”

“That’s enough, Detective. This case is officially closed. And you will not bring any of your suspicions up again. Else I’ll have to give a bad report to Bei Fong.” And with that, Akihiro brushed by him and out the office door, striding through the bullpen and into the hallway.

Mako remained rooted to his spot, watching Akihiro’s back disappear until his eyes fell upon a smirking face he suddenly wanted to smash for the second time in twenty-four hours. 

Covering the short distance to their desks in a few long strides, Mako grabbed Zhang by the collar and hauled them back into the Chief’s office, ignoring the surprised looks of the other officers in the room and slamming the door. 

Zhang straightened his uniform as soon as Mako let go, though he continued to hover over him, reminding the older man of his advantages in size and strength. 

“This is all bullshit, and we both know it,” Mako said.

One of Zhang’s eyebrows quirked upward. “I don’t see why we can’t just let bygones be bygones here, kid. We both got what we wanted, after all.”

“You played me.”

“I took your case from you. Consider that payback for my nose. But you still got to come out of this looking like a hero. So quit questioning it, and let’s get back to work.”

Zhang lunged for the door, but Mako blocked it with his body. “Tell me, partner. Who exactly were those men who died last night? And how did you get the kid to finger them?”

“You’re fucking insane, you know that?”

“And I’m assuming it was you who told Huang to make sure things went bad last night. Did you just want to make sure that this case got wrapped up with a neat little bow or did you want those guys dead for some other reason?”

“Is that how desperate you are? Are you feeling so guilty about offing those perps that you’re trying to find a way to put this on me?”

Those words made Mako stop short and wonder for a second. Was he so determined to rationalize his role in all of this that he had concocted a way to make it all not his fault? Registering the way his partner’s defenses had been breached, Zhang shoved past him and opened the door.

“We all did what we were supposed to, kid. Not everything’s a conspiracy.”

Did what we were supposed to…where had he…?

“Look, kid,” Zhang continued. “Maybe you should see about taking a little time off. Get your head together.” The words spoke of concern, but the man’s voice was tinged with something else. Mako looked at his partner in anger. 

“Who’s trying to box who out now?”

“Hey, I’m just looking out for you.”

“Right…”

Zhang took a menacing step in his direction, his face going from faux-sincere to threatening in a split second. “Get your fucking shit together and get your head back on what matters. Or I’m gonna find a way to make sure that you do.”

Once again, Mako’s head was spinning. Rather than dignifying Zhang’s threat with a retort, he simply walked out of the room.

“Where are you going,” Zhang called after him.

“Something I’ve got to do.” Mako didn’t even turn around.

“You think about what I said, kid. You think about it long and hard.” The pitch of the older man’s craggy voice suddenly had a note of desperation in it. 

 

The officer in charge of booking perps into lockup looked up from her lunch as Mako came stomping toward her. 

“Can I help you?” she drawled, clearly annoyed at the interruption. 

“Yesterday, a woman came to headquarters and attacked me. Some other cops arrested her and brought her in. I need to know if she’s still here.”

“Name?”

“No idea. She was older, maybe 60.”

The officer snorted out a laugh and sized Mako up, amused, no doubt, at the thought of him taking a beating from a senior citizen. 

“Just look.”

“Ok, ok.” She ran a finger down the records of the previous day’s detentions. 

“Here we go. Looks like only one officer was assaulted by an old lady yesterday. Her name is Miao. We held her for a few hours. Then it looks like she went to the hospital.”

“What? What for?”

“For being bugfuck crazy? Fuck if I know.”

“Which hospital?”

She told him. Mako reached for the notebook in his pocket and scrawled the information down. 

“Thanks.”

“You looking to get some payback?” she asked, still laughing at him.

“Just need to ask her some questions.”

“Sure thing, hot stuff. Just don’t let her get a hold of anything she can throw.”

 

Mako had only ever been to a hospital once, and the experience had ended with him sneaking out in order to avoid being taken by the police and put back in the children’s home, his single panicked thought being to get back to Bolin as fast as possible. Ever since then, he’d instinctively avoided these places, even once they posed no threat to his freedom.

Once inside, his senses were assaulted with the smell of healing incense. He coughed again, painfully, as he walked up to the triage desk. The young man sitting behind it didn’t even look up, “Put down your name and have a seat. It’s going to be a while.”

Mako shoved his badge into the guy’s face. “I’m here to see Miao. She would have been brought in yesterday by other cops.”

The boy sniffed. “Oh her. Room 238. Be careful though. That heart attack barely slowed her down.”

“Heart attack?”

“A small one they said, but yeah. Happens sometimes when someone that age gets that worked up.”

“Is she going to be ok?”

The boy shrugged. This wasn’t helping Mako’s state of mind. He didn’t like this woman, but the list of lives he was directly or indirectly responsible for destroying or endangering was getting intolerably long.

“Where?”

The young man pointed, and Mako followed the direction of his finger, past various sick and injured people waiting in chairs, to a stairwell. Up two flights of stairs, he entered a hallway painted a soothing blue. Waterbenders in pale blue and firebenders in deep burgundy walked from room to room, ministering to the people there. At room 238, there was a bored-looking policeman sitting on a chair just outside the door, flipping through a magazine. Was this really necessary? She couldn’t possibly be a flight risk.

“Hey, buddy, take a break,” said Mako, and the other cop set his magazine down in relief before scuttling off toward the cafeteria.

Inside, there was a bed covered in crisp white sheets, a window looking out into a garbage chute, and an incense burner in the corner. 

Miao was lying in the bed, staring at the ceiling. She turned toward him as he entered the room and registered no surprise, no anger, no emotion whatsoever when she saw him. Her face was much paler than the last two times he had seen her.

“I keep telling them to take that stinking shit out of here,” she said, her finger waving toward the incense burner. 

“It’s supposed to help.”

She huffed. “You believe that?”

“I don’t know.”

“So you here to finish what you started? You ruined my family, took away my freedom…”

“I think your violent streak had a role to play in that.”

She scoffed again, but the look in her eyes betrayed a begrudging respect.

Without asking for permission, he took a chair from the wall and put it next to the bed.

“I am sorry for what is happening to you, but…”

She raised a feeble hand to stop him. “But I’m getting what I deserve, isn’t that it? I’m a horrible person, a worse parent.”

Mako didn’t argue with her.

“When I was a little girl, my mother used to beat me with a hairbrush, burn me with cigarettes, and tie me to my bed at night. She said it was the only way to keep the “bad spirit” out of me. Do you believe in spirits?”

“Well...I’ve…I’ve seen them.”

“I never believed in spirits until a few months ago, and then…you know.”

He nodded.

“I guess there are still a few surprises left in this world for evil old cunts like me.” She laughed, a hoarse laugh but with a ring in it that made it almost sound young. 

“Tell me, Detective,” she continued. “Do you think it’s bad spirits in us that make us do bad things.”

Mako licked his lips and coughed dryly. “No,” he said finally. “I think we all make our own choices.”

She seemed to like that. “Good boy.”

“I need to ask you something.”

Her face turned toward the ceiling again, and she closed her eyes, a weary expression falling over her features like a veil.

“What did you mean yesterday when you said I gave her to ‘them?’ And what did you mean by ‘we did everything.’”

She said nothing for a long moment, her eyes opening, and a few shallow breaths flowing in and out of her nostrils. Her grey-white hair was splayed all over the pillow, giving her a kind of vulnerability she didn’t have in their previous encounters.

“When I first saw you, I thought you were one of them…”

“Who’s ‘them?’”

“A lot of the people I grew up with, a lot of the people I see every day think all cops are the same, that they’re sadistic motherfuckers who hate poor people. But not all cops are the same. Some are good at their jobs. Some mean well. Some are too rule-bound. And some are just stupid. Only a select number of cops are really, really bad.”

His tongue felt like it was cleaving to the roof of his mouth. He tried to swallow. 

“And who are the bad cops?” It came out as a whisper.

“I’m not telling you nothing.”

“Why?”

“Because you gave her to them.”

His brain was spinning. “And by ‘them’ you mean the police.”

“Not just any police. I know who your partner is, Mako.” She pronounced the syllables of his name slowly and deliberately, and the sound made his breath hitch in a way that nearly brought on another coughing fit. 

“Please,” he said when his lungs recovered. “I need to know what you know. Something bad is going on, but I have no evidence, no proof. I don’t even really know what it is. I need you to help me.”

She kept staring at the ceiling in silence.

“If you won’t do it for me, do it for Jin.”

Something between a laugh and a wail escaped her mouth, her face screwing up so that the creases of her forehead formed deep folds. “If I help you, they’ll probably kill her.”

“How can they…how could you possibly be sure of that?”

“I’m sure,” she said, and her tone brooked no argument.

Mako’s head was pounding. He felt like he was on the verge of tears. In a single day, he’d killed two men, put an old woman in the hospital, and now endangered the life of a child—not to mention the unnumbered junkies who died or were injured in the tenement fire. 

“I’ll save her,” he said, succumbing to the urge to make promises he didn’t know if he could keep. He said it again just to convince himself. “I’ll save her and I’ll make sure you both get to a better place.”

Her face turned toward him once again, and her features looked softer than they had before. They locked eyes for a long moment. Then, with the hand that was on the other side of the bed, she reached across herself and towards him as if for a hand shake. He met her grasp with his. She stared at him hard. “I’m still not convinced you’re not an idiot. But I guess it’s possible that you’re a good one. If you can guarantee my granddaughter’s safety. If you can prove it to me that they can’t get to her, then I’ll help you. But you best be watch yourself, boy. Don’t let anyone know that we’ve talked.”

He nodded, and without another word, he stepped up and left the room, running into the on-duty officer on the way out. “Thanks for the relief, man. I owe ya,” he said. And Mako hesitated, wondering if whatever conspiracy he was on the verge of uncovering included this poor sap as well. Mako looked to the right and left and saw that the hallway was empty. Then without warning, he struck out with one hand and with pinpoint accuracy hit a pressure point that sent the man staggering back, unconscious. Mako broke his fall, and hauled his body into a nearby storage closet. He used bandages to gag him and bind his hands and feet. Someone would find him eventually, but hopefully this would buy him a few hours. 

 

Next, he needed to get back to Headquarters and grab a few things from his desk before Zhang and who knows who else got wind of what he was up to. He hurried into the bullpen, relieved that his partner was nowhere in sight. But as he started hastily flipping through papers on his desk, he heard the Acting Chief’s voice calling to him from the office door. 

“Mako, I need to see you in here for a moment.”

His stomach did a flip. He walked into the office, and the door was swiftly shut behind him. Zhang was inside, and Mako tried not to look him in the eye, fearful that he would give himself away somehow.

“Do you recognize these, Detective?” Akihiro pointed to two small bags on his desk, the bags he had torn apart his own and Zhang’s desk looking for, the bags that went missing from the evidence locker. 

The blood drained from Mako’s face. “I…” He couldn’t decide whether to start with denials or explain calmly that Zhang was framing him, but before he could make up his mind…

“We found these in your partner’s locker.”

Mako blinked, momentarily speechless. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Zhang claims that you put them there, and I believe him.”

Nothing came out of Mako’s mouth, try though he might to speak. 

“Li here saw you picking the lock yesterday before you came up to the witness interview—Zhang says you had a bit of a spat just prior.”

It was only in that moment that the obsequious face of Officer Li finally came into focus against the back wall.

“And according to the log, you were the last one to check these out of the evidence room.”

In the end, Mako didn’t utter a word of protest. He was done fighting. Zhang gazed at him with a look of complete triumph, and Mako had to give it to him. It was perfect. Inarguable. Zhang wouldn’t get him into trouble for stealing evidence OR for killing suspects. Nope, he’d get him for trying to frame a fellow officer. No ruse could be more perfectly calculated to destroy his credibility with other cops.

“Well, do you have anything to say for yourself?”

Mako drew himself up and looked Akihiro straight in the eyes. “I do not,” he said.

“Then you are suspended pending further inquiry. Hand over your badge.”

As Mako did so, he saw words of disappointment forming on the Acting Chief’s lips.

“Don’t even,” he retorted and strode out the door, half ready to see the entire place incinerated the way he’d seen the tenement go up the night before. 

 

Next stop: Bolin’s. 

His brother listened patiently as the whole story came out, eyes widening with each fresh revelation. 

“So what are you going to do?” 

“I’m not really sure. I thought maybe you could help me bust the girl out of the home.”

“And then what? She comes to live with you or me?”

Mako was silent. For once, he hadn’t thought that far ahead. He wasn’t used to Bolin being better at this than him. He blamed his lack of sleep.

“Can I have some coffee?” he asked. Bolin rose and walked across the living room to the sparklingly modern kitchen that filled Mako with no small amount of envy. He set about making the brew, though Mako had to fight the urge to come over there and make sure the beans were being ground correctly.

“We’re going to need bigger guns for this, Mako,” Bolin said, his back still turned. “We’re going to need…”

“No.”

“Mako.”

“No. I can’t ask her. Not after…”

“You know, I always thought you were smarter than me, but if you can’t get past your pride to see that this is the most obvious solution, then…”

“It’s not pride.”

“Right.”

“I can’t come begging her for help with this sort of thing when I’m avoiding her the rest of the time.”

“Ok, you have a point,” said Bolin, pouring one cup for himself and one for Mako. “But experience tells me she’s going to help you anyway. You can figure out a way to not be an ostrich horse’s ass the rest of the time.”

Mako took a long sip even though the brew was still way too hot. He felt a dead spot forming on the tip of his tongue where he’d burned it. 

“Ok,” he said.

 

Mako and Bolin stood outside Korra’s door and got no answer to their knocks. Bolin tried shouting into the crack. “Korra, it’s me. Your buddy Bo. And Mako is NOT with me, so you can open the door.”

Mako glared at him, and Bolin shrugged. “She said if I tried to spring you on her again, she’d earthbend me into next week.”

“So what do you think is going to happen if she opens the door and sees both of us?”

“You know I’d do anything for you. Even face the wrath of the Avatar.”

He pounded again with his whole fist until Mako put a hand on his shoulder. “She’s not here, bro.”

“So what should we do? Just wait for her?”

Mako thought for a second. “I think I know where else we can go. And who else might help us.”

The sun was almost completely down, just as sliver of red against the horizon as they jogged in the direction of the ferry to Air Temple Island.


	7. Chapter 7

The first person they saw as they approached the temple was Jinora, looking older than she had the last time they’d seen her. It wasn’t just the fact that she was easily an inch taller and her face was losing its childish roundness. Her grey eyes looked deeper, wiser, like someone who had looked into the beating heart of the universe and lived to talk about it. 

She was visibly surprised when she saw them, worried as her eyes fell on Mako. “Are you here to see Korra?” 

His heart sunk a little lower in his chest, and he wondered what Korra had been saying. “We need to talk to your dad. Korra’s here?”

The girl nodded and pointed in the direction of the training platform. They followed her until they saw the figures of the Avatar and her tutor come into view, moving synchronically through airbending forms against the backdrop of the sunset, their gestures meditative and purposeful. Mako remembered long afternoons in the not so distant past when airbending practice for Korra meant unleashing a hurricane from her fists. 

Jinora called to her father, and Mako felt his heart stop for a second as the two of them stopped their practice and turned around. They both looked confused. Korra crossed her arms over her body as she walked forward, Tenzin following after her. 

“The boys say they need to talk to you?” It was half a question and half a statement. 

Feeling awkward, Mako reached out and shook Tenzin’s hand. “Sir,” he said, nodding in greeting. Then he turned to Korra, and the same gesture felt so unbelievably wrong that he let his arm drop to his side. “Hey Korra.”

“Hey,” she said, but she sort of looked over his left shoulder. A weak smile formed on her lips as she turned to his brother. “Hey, Bo.”

“Hey!” he said, a little too enthusiastically, picking up on the ambient tension. “This isn’t a social visit,” he said nervously, and it sounded weird coming out of the younger brother’s mouth. “Mako has problems.”

Mako wanted to punch him. “Oh, you don’t even have to tell me…” he felt Korra thinking, remembering his hang-up from the night previous.

“I could use your help with something,” he said, trying to recover the moment. “Both of you. It’s sort of a police thing.”

“We are about to eat dinner,” said Tenzin. “Join us, and you can tell us about it.”

Korra exhaled loudly and looked down at the ground, prodding at the dirt with her toe. 

“We don’t want to impose.”

“Nonsense,” Korra said finally. “If you need our help, we’re happy to give it.” Her voice was conciliatory, but as she turned to lead the group toward the family’s quarters, she met Mako’s eyes for this first time with a look that told him she was done fucking around. 

 

Dinner was a predictably awkward affair, and Mako was thankful that Bolin and Tenzin’s kids did most of the talking. Korra sat as far away from him as she could and mostly stared at her food, stabbing at her rice with her chopsticks and occasionally bringing a soybean up to her mouth. Pema asked him politely how work was going.

“Well, I’ve been suspended.” He figured it was better to just come out with the truth.

Korra looked up from the food she was pushing around her plate and gave him a look of genuine concern. “When?” she asked, her voice still quiet and guarded.

“Today.” And at that point, he was seized by a coughing fit that forced him to get up from the table. Pema gave him some water and then set about brewing a tea that she said would help as the kids cleared the table.

Mako resumed his seat, meeting Korra and Tenzin’s expectant looks, and tried to explain the situation as straightforwardly as possible, chagrined by the fact that his story was, well, short on facts and long on insinuation. He was sure by now that something nefarious was going on with Zhang, probably also with Huang, and possibly with the Acting Chief. But in order to prove any of it, he needed to find a way to get two witnesses—who were only in danger because he’d put them there—to safety. 

There were things he didn’t say or didn’t reveal completely. He didn’t say in clear terms that he was the one who started the fire. He didn’t bring up the already strained relationship between him and Zhang and how badly it had soured in the past two days, and he didn’t talk about how any of it made him feel. It was all too raw, too fresh, the pain in his head and heart matching the smoke-stung soreness of his throat. It hurt to even talk at that point. For so many reasons.

Korra’s face became thoughtful. He wanted to acknowledge to her that he had no right to ask for her help right now, that if it were just for himself, if there weren’t other lives at stake, he wouldn’t. He wished he’d been able to get her alone to explain, to apologize in every possible way for being a terrible friend, but it wasn’t possible at that moment, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to form the words if given an actual opportunity. The expanse between what he wanted to say and what actually came out of his mouth—if anything did—was almost always cavernous. 

“So what are we supposed to do, just take this girl from the home?” Korra asked. “Then what?”

“I don’t really know,” he admitted. “I’d be willing to pull her out of there if it means saving her life, but if possible, we should find a way to do it, you now, legally.”

Korra looked thoughtful for a moment before piping up again. “Tenzin, can I use the phone in your office?” 

“Of course,” replied her mentor. And she was up and jogging down the hallway, her wolftail the last thing Mako saw bobbing around a corner.

There was a long, thoughtful silence and a shuffling of tea cups before Tenzin turned back to Mako. “We’re going to have to tell Lin.”

“She’s on leave. There’s no proof yet. I don’t know if we should…”

“Can you imagine what Lin would do if she knew that I knew about this and hadn’t kept her informed?”

“I see your point.”

“Unfortunately, corruption in the police force is something Republic City has had to deal with from time to time. And it’s a thing best dealt with swiftly.”

Mako nodded and took a long draught of his tea. He was aware that events were being set in motion that might have grave implications for the police force, and perhaps even for his future place within it. But, he reflected, this was a ball that had started rolling as soon as he decided not to follow Zhang’s lead and pursue this murder case on his own, and it was too late to stop it now. 

“I think perhaps we should talk to the President as well and ask him about opening up an independent investigation.”

“He can do that?”

“He can appoint a special prosecutor, yes. But it may take some convincing.”

“Maybe with a push from the Avatar…” This was Bolin’s contribution, but he was cut off by Korra’s voice coming back toward them. “Nope. Bolin, you should go with Tenzin.”

Everyone looked at her in surprise as she entered the room, smiling as she re-claimed her seat. “I don’t have a…great history with the President,” she continued. “Bolin saved his life just a few months ago. I think he’ll do a better job.” She winked in the direction of Bolin, who was beaming, before turning to look at Mako with a serious face. 

“I just talked to Asami, and we have an idea,” she began. Mako gulped nervously. He’d been ignoring the heiress since the South Pole as well because he could only succumb to the temptation to let her help him forget his feelings for Korra so many times before she stopped forgiving him.

“The Sato family has set up a scholarship fund to send orphan girls to a private school in the Earth Kingdom.” Mako remembered seeing something about this in the newspaper. “It’s the same one Asami went to. She asked me the night I came home if I would help pick the candidates.”

Mako had a hunch about where this was going. “This girl, Korra. I have no idea what kind of education…”

“It’s ok.” She smiled reassuringly. “Most of them don’t. We will add Jin’s name to the list along with a couple of other girls from that home, just to avoid drawing too much attention to her.”

“Thank you.” He breathed a sigh of relief, the muscles in his shoulders and neck relaxing ever so slightly. 

“Asami will call the matron and issue the invitations tonight. Someone will come by to pick her up tomorrow and take her to the Sato mansion. You can talk to her there, and then she’ll be taken to school.”

It was a beautiful idea—the promise of a better life than someone like Jin could most likely imagine. But this was the point where Mako felt the need to mention the police guard tied up in the storage closet. “Someone over there is going to find out we’re onto them,” he said. “I bought myself a little time, but they are going to know that I talked to her eventually, and when they do, they’re going to try to get the girl out of play. Her grandmother seemed to think they might even kill her. She might be right.”

Korra thought for a second, “What if I stake out the place she’s staying tonight, make sure no one tries to remove her before one of our people picks her up.”

Tenzin interjected. “Korra, the White Lotus can…”

“No, it’s ok. I’d like to do this myself.” She looked hard at Mako. “That way you can tell the old woman that her granddaughter has the Avatar’s protection.” He didn’t think it was possible to love her more than he did in that moment.

“What about the old woman?” asked Bolin. “How are you going to get back to her if she’s surrounded by cops?” 

“We will ask Raiko to have the charges against her dropped immediately. They’ll have to let her go once she has recovered.”

“And that’s where we’ll send the White Lotus,” Korra added. “We’ll disguise them as Air Acolytes coming to visit the sick. Just to be safe.”

 

It was a plan, and for the first time in weeks, Mako felt a tiny bit lighter. Tenzin called the President’s secretary and set up an emergency meeting for that night. A message was sent to Lin. Mako felt as if he’d been holding the fraying seams of his world together with two hands, and all of a sudden, people all around him were jumping up to help. He watched as Bolin and Tenzin climbed onto Oogi together. And then as Korra turned from her White Lotus bodyguards in full saffron garb to go get Naga, he realized to his simultaneous relief and panic that everything was taken care of. There was nothing for him to do but wait, and the loss of control was intolerable. 

“Korra,” he called, running after her. She turned with one hand on the polar bear dog’s flank and looked at him quizzically. “I’m coming with you.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but he stopped her. “Please,” he begged. “I trust you with everything, but I can’t just sit around and wait to hear back. If something happens…”

Taking a couple of steps toward him, she looked him full in the face, the lamps from the house casting a pool of light around him, while she stood in shadow. “How long has it been since you slept?” she asked, and he wondered exactly how bad he looked to her. 

“It’s been a while,” he answered. He inhaled a mouthful of cold air that set him coughing again. 

“You need to rest,” she said, looking worried.

“Not going to happen.”

There was a long pause where she seemed to be debating what to do. “Suit yourself,” she said finally, leaping up onto Naga and gesturing for him to join her. He settled onto the back end of Naga’s saddle, and his mind wandered back for a second to the first time they’d searched the city together. He’d been terrified at the thought of touching her then. He still was. Just as he had a year ago, he clung to the back of the saddle for dear life, his eyes focusing on the hood of her coat as they started off into the night.

 

Speaking purely in terms of physical conditions, Mako had certainly been on less comfortable stake-outs, but none of those had involved a woman he’d been calling in the middle of the night. Across the street from the children’s home was an all-night diner with big picture windows that offered a good view of the entrance. 

They settled into a booth, ordered tea and mochi, and mostly avoided eye contact. At one point, Korra went outside to find a pay phone to call Asami and confirm that the girls were ready to be picked up the next morning. When she came back, he had ordered another pot of tea. She poured herself a cup and scooted closer to the window, pulling her feet up onto the bench so that her knees rested against the edge of the table. For a while he just watched her fidget and sigh. She really was not cut out for this sort of thing, which made him all the more grateful that she had volunteered. 

“I imagine you had better things planned for tonight,” he offered, trying to break the tedium.

She leaned her head against the window, her breath creating a small patch of condensation on the glass. She put a finger in the middle of it and turned it to ice, spirals of frost radiating outward from the center. “Not really,” she said. “Just using Tenzin’s library, learning whatever I can about spirits.”

“Being the Avatar requires as much paperwork as being a cop, huh?”

She smiled a little. “Yup. Interrupted by outbreaks of violence.”

He laughed, and the laugh set off a cough.

“That doesn’t sound very good,” she said.

“It’s getting better.”

She thunked her head against the window one more time before readjusting in her seat so that she was facing him again. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Why did you wait this long to ask for my help?”

He sighed wearily. His brain felt like it was wrapped in cotton. His eyelashes itched. He wanted to curl up right there in the booth and fall asleep, and he wasn’t quite ready for where this conversation was heading. “I thought I was handling things. I didn’t know how badly in over my head I was until today.”

“Then why did you call me last night?”

He tried to look like he had no idea what she was talking about, but it was too late for subterfuge. “Bolin wasn’t home. I’d just seen two men burned alive and it was my fault. I didn’t know what was going to happen next with my career. I don’t know. I just felt like talking to someone.” He felt his voice getting edgier. 

“So why did you hang up?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose and massaged the corners of his eyes, trying to ward off the stabbing pain that was forming there. “I don’t know, Korra. I still want to be able to talk to you about this stuff, but this--” He gestured between the two of them. “Just isn’t as easy for me as it is for you.”

“What on earth makes you think that this is easy for me?” 

He opened his eyes and saw hard lines of pain and anger forming in her face. “I don’t even know how to be around you right now,” she said, frustration evident in her tone. “It’s all come here-go away with you lately. I’m afraid to do anything because I don’t know what’s going to piss you off. One night, you’re trying to kiss me, and then the next you’re telling me to stay away from you. And then the next night…”

“I know. I know, ok? I get it. I’m impossible right now.” He could say more. He could tell her that he didn’t quite know how to feel. Because as much as he missed her, in a way, the break up had been a relief. It meant that he could quit trying to walk on eggshells around her, that he no longer had to choose between his instincts and her needs, that they could figure out who they were and what they wanted without having to sacrifice personal integrity to protect the other person’s ego. He could say that he knew all of this to be right, but it didn’t stop him from wanting her in his very bones. He could remember only one way to love her and that was with everything he had. He was reeling in the throes of withdrawal, and he wouldn’t be ok again until he could look at her and stop needing her.

But he didn’t say any of that. Instead, he let the silence build until she excused herself for the bathroom, and he went back to staring silently out the window. It was closing in on midnight, and Mako knew that they still had hours to go. He fixed his eyes on the kid’s home, all the windows dark, every one tucked in safe for the night. He remembered one terrible night holding a thin pillow over his head trying to drown out the whimpers and sobs coming from the corners of the room, his heart overflowing with grief, his eyes dry. 

The minutes ticked by, and Mako realized that Korra had been gone for almost half an hour. He looked around the restaurant, and a waitress behind the counter pointed at the door. He put a fistful of yuans on the table and went outside, pulling his jacket a little closer against the chill. The streets were deserted, everyone gone home for the night, and just outside the entrance, Korra was sitting on the pavement, leaning against Naga, her eyes fixed on the doorway across the street. 

“You should come back inside,” he said. 

“I like it better out here.” 

“Loitering in doorways is illegal.”

“So arrest me.” She turned her head in his direction, and there was a challenge in her eyes. 

He accepted it by sitting next to her, settling into Naga’s soft warmth and letting the silence wrap around them. An apology seemed warranted here, but he couldn’t find the words. He thought about reaching for her hand to give it a squeeze, but he couldn’t be sure whether this was a friendly impulse or something else, so he stopped himself. 

“What did you mean when you said it was your fault?” she asked out of nowhere.

“Huh?”

“Inside, you said two men died and it was your fault.”

As a token of good faith, he confided the rest of the story in her. Her face grew even more serious as she listened.

“That doesn’t sound like your fault, Mako. I don’t know whether you were set up or not, but it sounds like it really could have been an accident.” He felt her strong, warm hand settle on his sleeve. Even through the fabric, it burned him like fire, but he couldn’t pull away.

“I don’t like that word.” He tried not to look at her.

“What? Accident?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“It’s a word people use when they’re avoiding responsibility.”

They were quiet for a while, her hand still resting on him. 

“Being responsible doesn’t mean you can keep bad things from happening to people, Mako. You can’t control everything.” This was one of the things he liked and hated about her, the way she could connect the dots in his brain based on what little information his words offered up. Her hand lifted off of him, and there was a numb spot where it had been. He wanted to grab for her, carry her off somewhere where they could kiss and hold and fuck and he could just lose himself in her. But he didn’t know what would happen once they had to return to the world and was forced to once again be a person who made choices. And that had always been the problem.

“Mako, you can always come to me for help, but I’m starting to think that maybe you’re right,” she said, and her voice sounded a little strangled. 

“About what?”

“This is too hard. Maybe we should stay away from each other after this. At least until…”

“Until I stop wanting to kiss you.” He offered it as a self-deprecating joke, and she laughed a small, sad laugh.

“I don’t think I’m ever going to stop wanting to kiss you,” she said, still looking away from him. The words washed over him like a cleansing tide. He hadn’t realized until that point how much he needed to know that she felt precisely as he did and how little he had let himself believe it before. 

What happened next could be called an “accident” because Mako couldn’t say for certain who was in control. Without perceptible volition from either of them, they were leaning into each other, his arm draping around her shoulders and her mouth pressing against his, warm and wet and soft. He tasted her slowly as her lips fell open and her fingers found their way into his hair, pulling him against her as he brought his other arm to her wait, practically drawing her into his lap. It was the wrong thing to be doing for so, so many reasons. But for a second, he felt less alone in his loneliness, less contemptible in his want. It wasn’t a beginning or a promise. It was more like she had taken a sadness he had carried for weeks and offered to share it with him. 

When she pulled away, his body still ached for her, but his mind was calm. He let his head fall against Naga’s flank and settle into the warm fur. Korra was still near him but had retreated into her own space, the distance between them once again unbridgeable, her eyes once again on the door. 

The next thing he knew it was light out. He had that oily feeling of having slept outside, but his head felt clearer, his senses more acute. It was the best sleep he’d had in over a week. She was still there, her eyes open and her knees drawn up to her chest. 

“Good morning,” she said, a tiny smile forming on her lips. “You didn’t miss much.”

“Shit. I’m sorry. Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“You needed it.” She stood and reached out a hand to help him up off the cold ground. He patted Naga’s giant head as he followed her inside where they took their old booth and ordered coffee and hunks of fried dough with sugar and cinnamon, the kind of food you wanted after a night spent outdoors. He excused himself to splash water on his face and run wet hands through his hair while she ordered seconds and continued their watch. 

They didn’t talk much, but their company was less agonizing than it had been the night before, her posture more open, her tone less exasperated when she did speak. 

At 9:00 am, they saw a luxury car pull onto the street, and Asami got out and mounted the stairs of the home. 

“I guess she decided to come herself,” said Korra. They both breathed easier and let themselves concentrate on something other than the building for a little while.

At 10:00, the bell on the door rang, and Mako turned around to see Asami walking inside, her face worried and pale. There were two little girls with her, and Jin was not one of them.


	8. Chapter 8

“I’m sorry,” said Asami before she even reached their table. “They told me all the girls were there when they did bed checks last night. The place was sealed, no one in or out, but she was gone this morning.”

“How could this have happened?” said Mako, trying not to maintain control over his tone in front of the other two children, already visibly disoriented and uncomfortable in their borrowed clothes and tight braids. 

“I don’t know.” Asami was on the verge of tears. “I asked last night how they handled security, and they assured me the place was secure, windows locked and barred. No one can get in except by the front door, and you guys were watching it all night, right?”

Mako shared a guilty look with Korra, reflecting ruefully that they probably could have been more attentive if they had been less preoccupied with…personal problems. 

He was trying to put some other rationalization together when a small voiced piped up. “There’s an unlocked window in the basement.”

“What?” said Mako.

One of the girls stepped forward. “In the basement. Only the littler ones can fit through it, and it’s high up, but if you stack up the junk in there…”

“Show us,” said Asami. She held out a hand to the girl, who took it warily, shy around this pretty stranger. The other one walked out with Mako as Korra fished yuans out of her pockets and paid for breakfast. 

The city had come alive since the previous night, Satomobile traffic thick going in the direction of the city centre. Across the street, the girls led them around the side of the building to where the garbage was left out for pickup and pointed out a small window right at ground level. It was open. Mako stretched himself out on the pavement and stuck his head inside. His broad shoulders wouldn’t fit all the way through. Sure enough, there was a precarious stack of old crates and a couple of broken chairs leaning against the wall. 

“Sometimes we use it to sneak out at night and…” she didn’t finish. “But you have to sneak down there when everyone’s asleep.”

“Do you know Jin? Did she say anything about trying to run away?” Korra asked.

The girl shook her head. “But she cried when they told us we would be leaving Republic City. She kept saying she wanted to go home.” 

All three young adults were speechless. At no point, Mako realized, had any of them thought about anything but Jin’s physical safety and the fact that—as they saw it—they were providing her with a better life. He looked from Asami to Korra. “I should go check her grandmother’s apartment. Maybe she’s there.”

“I’ll come with you. Naga can get us there fast,” said Korra. “Asami, can you get these two to the mansion?”

“Of course,” she said. Her green eyes met Mako’s. “I’m so sorry.” 

“Don’t.” He gave her a small, awkward hug. “You’ve been amazing.” His debt to this woman had already piled up beyond reckoning. 

Asami got the two girls into her Satomobile as Mako and Korra sprinted back toward the diner where Naga was waiting. He shouted a location as he leapt onto the saddle, and they were off, Mako once again holding on for dear life as Korra rather heedlessly maneuvered the polarbear dog around vehicles—often against the flow of traffic—somehow miraculously managing not to mow down any pedestrians when they used the sidewalk. 

The flat wasn’t far, but it took a little while to find the building again. The neighborhood looked different than it had at night, and in this part of the city, everything looked sort of the same, concrete block buildings stacked practically right on top of each other. The thudding in Mako’s chest matched Naga’s heavy panting, the only sounds he could hear as they wove through the side streets looking for the right entrance.

“I think this is it,” he finally said. Korra found a spot for Naga to wait without drawing too much attention from the main road. When they ventured inside, the woman named Mags was standing in the exact same spot as before, leaning against the wall, chewing tobacco, her dead-eyed stare registering zero recognition as Mako passed her.

The door to Jin’s apartment was unlocked. Mako held his breath as he opened it, only exhaling once he’d taken a look around the place and seen that everything was miraculously undisturbed. Korra looked around the place intently, though she gave him no clues as to what she was thinking. They were careful not to disturb the quiet of the place as they took hesitant steps into the small main room, as if the ghosts of this tragic family might still be lingering. Around a corner, there was a hallway that led to a single bedroom. Mako motioned for Korra to follow him. As they approached, they saw a small sleeping form resting quietly on a neatly made double bed covered by a faded quilt. The room was spare but fastidiously kept, just like everything in the flat. The only other furniture was a beaten up dresser covered by a yellowing doily and a couple of wood boxes that likely contained this family’s only treasures. Mako realized that the girl and her grandmother probably shared this room, as it was the case in many poor households—multiple generations living together, the small children sleeping with the widowed grandparents. 

Korra lingered in the doorway as Mako approached the foot of the bed. Jin was still dressed in a standard-issue night shift from the children’s home, her slippers discarded on the floor, strands of hair falling out of her braids. Mako thought about her long journey here, a journey likely made in fear and incomprehensible grief. He didn’t think his heart could sink any lower. 

He sat at the foot of the bed, the worn mattress giving slightly, the bed frame creaking under his weight. He was just close enough to put a hand on her arm and shake her gently. Jin startled and looked toward where he was sitting, her half-closed eyes registering surprise and then fear and then recognition.

“You…” she started. And then she began crying.

Mako wasn’t sure what he should do. He looked back at Korra, whose face looked sad and confused and offered nowhere to go but forward. “Jin,” he said. “I know it’s hard, but I have to take you away from here. It’s not safe.”

“I want to stay here.”

“I know. But there are people out there who want to…” He couldn’t bring himself to actually say it.

“Where is my grandma?” She rubbed at a teary eye with the back of her hand, smearing moisture across her cheek. Her sobs stopped for a moment as she looked at him expectantly.

Mako felt his throat get tight. The truth was… “She had to go away too. There are people out there who want to hurt both of you. I promised your grandmother I’d make sure you were safe.”

“Can I see her?”

“Maybe soon.” He felt the falseness of that promise as soon as it left his lips. He had no idea if these two would ever be reunited or even if they should be given what he had witnessed before. “But not now.” He rose from the bed and held out a hand, gesturing for her to come with him.

She started to cry again. “I don’t understand. We didn’t do anything wrong. He said we wouldn’t get hurt if I did what he said.”

Mako sat back down again, his knees going soft. 

“Who said that?”

“A policeman.”

“A policeman like me?”

“Not like you. He’s ugly.”

“Did you see him at the police station the other day?”

She nodded. “He was the one who asked me the questions.”

Mako felt his skin begin to prickle. His mouth went dry. It wasn’t a surprise exactly, but…

“Had you seen him before?”

She nodded again.

“Jin, I need you to tell me.”

“It’s written down.”

He leaned back a bit and looked at her skeptically. “What?”

Jin scooted herself off the mattress and made her way to the dresser. She slid open a middle drawer and lifted a small, neat stack of clothing and put it on top. Mako came and stood over her and watched. There was a secret compartment at the bottom of the drawer. Inside was what looked like a diary. Jin picked it up and fanned through the pages, each covered in characters scrawled with a shaky hand. He took it from the hand that offered it and sat back down on the bed, scanning each page in wonder.

“She called it insurance. She said it would be important if things started going wrong. Grandma is always listening and watching. And she writes everything down. It’s her favorite thing to do—writing about people and the bad things they do. Sometimes I would tell her things to write.”

“Is that where you got the idea to follow people?”

Jin nodded, and Mako pictured the girl sneaking about in hopes of bringing home scraps of information to her disapproving guardian, hoping, perhaps, to win some measure of affection from a woman who had clearly dedicated herself to cataloguing the corruption around her. It began to hit Mako just how little he understood about either of these people whose lives he had been so willing to rearrange in the name of…whatever it was. The more information he got, the less, he realized, he actually knew.

“Korra, come look at this.” He motioned her over, and Korra came to look over his shoulder. Jin, who hadn’t registered her presence until now, stared at the Avatar’s face in wary admiration. “Are you the…”

“Yeah, she is.”

Jin couldn’t take her eyes off of Korra, who put a reassuring hand on the girl’s shoulder. Mako had seen people look at her like this before. He used to like that he was one of the few people who really knew her as Korra, but lately, he had come to envy those who saw her only as the Avatar. Their relationship to her was simple, uncomplicated by any thought or comprehension of their mutual humanity. 

The diary contained descriptions of all sorts of people Miao thought were up to no good. Some were clearly just neighborhood eccentrics, but some of what she had seen was legitimately criminal. The most detailed entries had to do with her daughter’s friends and associates, none of whom she liked.

“What did she plan to do with all of this?” Korra asked Jin.

Jin shrugged. “She was just a thing she did—she never told me a plan. She said she would know if the time came. I…she might be mad at me for showing it to you. She doesn’t like the police.” 

Tear tracks still marked the girl’s face. Korra reached down to wipe at her cheek stroke her messy braids. Mako thought of the way she was with Tenzin’s kids. “It’s ok, Jin. You were right to show it to us.”

As he looked back at the diary, he was also reminded of the scores of calls and letters the police received every week from people convinced that their neighbors were trying to poison their cats or that their son’s girlfriend was involved in witchcraft, chronicles of misanthropy so metastasized that the callers and writers couldn’t sort out nuisance from actual threat. 

But none were as detailed or a strategically hoarded as this diary, which contained meticulous records of drug deals the woman had witnessed, of known gangsters who came in and out of the building, of Mags’s nightly visitors. If it was all true, it was the most comprehensive record of criminal activity on any single neighborhood in Republic City. There were entries about police officers who occasionally bought drugs in this neighborhood, who took money in exchange for tip-offs about raids, standard corruption stuff. Someone who fit Zhang’s description appeared in there once or twice. He’d come by a couple of times to talk to her about her prying, her reputation for being in everyone’s business. She didn’t stop, but she was more careful. It looked like she started placating corrupt cops by giving them information she gathered about the triads, playing two sides of a tenuous alliance against each other. He guessed no one knew about the diary or he wouldn’t be holding it at that moment. Furthermore, he supposed that the only thing that had been protecting Miao until this point was her age. 

“Jin,” he said. “What about the night your parents died? Did you tell her about that?”

Jin reached out and turned the pages ahead several entries. As Mako read, he imagined Miao dispassionately taking down the account of her daughter’s death as dictated by that daughter’s own child. It was a chilling thought, made explicable only by the extant evidence that this record keeping was Miao’s only way of coping with the calamity that was her life. By churning out this ledger of wrongs, perhaps she felt she gained some measure of control over the chaos. For her, the institutions that dispensed justice were bankrupt, so she pursued it here, building a weapon she could detonate as soon as the need or opportunity presented itself. Or something. 

As he read, the story of the murder began to line up with his interpretation of the crime scene and contradicted the testimony the girl had given at headquarters. It went as follows: Jin had been watching her parents’ most recent flat—the book indicated that they moved around a lot, which explained why Mako hadn’t been able to find it based on three-year old police records—when two men came over and demanded to be let in. She’d listened at the window near the kitchen but only heard pieces of what was said—stuff about “orders from the Big man…need to get your shit in line…won’t tolerate people resisting him”—based on the description and references to past events, one of the men was clearly Zhang. The other wasn’t identifiable. There had been a fight. Her parents died. Then the two men argued about what to do with the bodies, said their orders were to reason with them, not to kill them, and the Big Man wouldn’t like it if he found out about this. 

One man left and came back with a Satomobile. Jin had watched as they loaded the bodies into the back and drove two blocks and around the corner—around the corner, Mako kicked himself—to the alley. It was already occupied by two men. They were acting weird, like they were on drugs. The murderers roughed them up a bit until they gave up the little bags that were in their pockets. Then they were ordered to help place the bodies in the alley. Zhang asked if either of the addicts could bend. One could bend fire. He was told to burn the bodies a little bit to make it look like they fought a firebender. 

“Jin,” Korra asked. Why did you say that the two drug addicts killed your parents? If you were afraid, why didn’t you just say you didn’t know who did it?”

The girl looked stunned. “That’s not what I said.”

“Huh?” Mako was trying to scan back in his head to the interview. Akihiro had been talking to him the whole time, distracting him…

“The policeman asked me if I saw a firebender the alley. I said yes, so he asked if there was another man with him. I said yes. Then he said to describe them…”

Mako rubbed his face with both hands, hardly believing that he had fallen for something so simple. Akihiro had gotten him so wound up by implying that Jin would never be able to identify the killers that he had heard what he wanted to hear. 

That the Acting Chief was somehow involved with all this—that he was possibly even the “Big Man”—was becoming clear. He scanned back to his original place in the diary, and starting a few months back, there were more and more entries about rumors of a group of police officers, including one they called the “Big Man,” trying to create a place for themselves in the drug trade, pocketing some of the stuff that was confiscated in raids and various other cases and selling it back on the street. Around the time the tar market exploded, they tried to corner it, recruiting people on the fringes of the triads—mostly non-benders who had second-class status in the mostly bender gangs—to work for them. Mako supposed that Jin’s parents had been some of those people. 

“Mako, you need to show this to Beifong,” said Korra. Mako nodded, but he knew that as a piece of evidence, this diary had tenuous value. He would need Miao and Jin to give their testimony in person, in court. Otherwise…

“We need to get going,” he said. “Jin, the people your grandmother wrote about are very dangerous. You aren’t safe here, and you aren’t safe at the children’s home, not as long as police officers like the ones you’ve seen can get to you there. Do you understand?”

She nodded. Her eyes were dry.

“The woman who wants to take you to school is a friend of mine—of both of us. She will take good care of you and make sure you get there safely and that you are treated well. Do you believe me?”

She nodded again, and Mako felt the tension drain just a little bit. 

“Do you have some other clothes here?” Korra asked. 

Jin nodded and pointed at a drawer.

“Mako, can you give us some privacy for a minute? We’ll meet you out there.”

He excused himself quickly, shutting the bedroom door behind him. What he’d just discovered felt like a break, but he wasn’t ready to trust in what the diary tantalizingly promised just yet, not after everything that had happened. 

And sure enough, as he came back into the main room of the flat, standing on the threshold of the door he had forgotten to close were two faces he was none too happy to see again. Zhang’s signature scowl deepened as soon as he saw Mako, and Huang typically blank expression turned to one of surprise.

“What are you doing here?” hissed Mako through teeth clenched almost as tightly as his fists.

“The home you put that girl in reported a runaway,” replied Zhang in a self-righteous tone.

“So you’re a truant officer now, Detective?”

“I’m handling her family’s case.”

“I thought that case was closed.”

“Look, you have no business here, kid. You’re suspended. Get out of the way, or I’ll have to arrest you for interfering.”

“I’d like to see you try.” Mako was now smirking defiantly, realizing in the moment just how badly he was spoiling for a fight, red-hot anger clawing its way to the surface of his consciousness. 

Zhang tried to push past him, but Mako shoved him back with a single hand, catching Huang in the gut with his left as the other officer tried to rush him. Both men came at him, and Mako danced easily around their attempted blows, exulting in the fact that he hadn’t even tried to firebend yet. It felt like being in the arena all over again. He sent Zhang sprawling into the hallway with a kick to the chest and turned to see that Huang had opened his water skin and was sending a barrage of icy knives in his direction. “Of course,” he thought for a second. “Not a knife. Waterbending…” 

Mako was in a bad stance for deflecting the attack and had to duck and roll out of the way before he could try to take Huang down with fire. He never got that far. Just as his head came up, he saw Huang’s attack being redirected toward him, and in a split-second, the surprised cop was frozen to a wall. Mako turned his head and saw Korra, waterbending with one hand while the other held Jin behind her back. 

“Let’s go,” she said, and he let her run past him, bringing up the rear. Zhang was still reeling on the floor, and as they ran by, Mako saw him try to grab at Jin’s foot, and the girl’s steps faltered a bit as she tried to avoid it. Without even thinking, Mako turned and kicked the older man in the gut once, twice. It felt good, the rage bubbling deliciously in his chest, so with the third blow he went for the face and watched with satisfaction as blood dripped from Zhang’s nose onto the carpet. He readied himself for a fourth when he heard Korra saying his name and felt her strong hand closing tightly around his arm. He turned to meet her troubled eyes and came back to himself, giving in to the pressure of her warm fingers as she took his hand and let them both away.


	9. Chapter 9

A/N: I feel the need to direct your attention here to the M rating and the warning about violence. Also, I'm so sorry, Mako.

"The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at him." –Vladimir Nabokov, a like-minded asshole

\----

Jin was still clinging to Korra's back with a death grip when Naga came to a stop in front of the Sato mansion. "It's ok. It's ok," she repeated, gently prying tiny fingers from her waist and turning around to smooth the girl's hair. Mako jumped down and held out his arms to help Jin down, but she still wouldn't let go of Korra, who finally had to scoop her in her arms and slide down Naga's flank before carrying her toward the steps of the mansion. Mako caught a fleeting glimpse of the child's face before Jin turned away from him. His body was still crackling with adrenaline, but he hated the role he'd played in making her so afraid.

Asami came bursting out the door, clearly overwhelmed with relief as she made to take Jin from Korra's arms. "Give us a minute," Korra said. "We had a bit of a scare back there."

Asami looked past her to Mako, and he had no real answer to meet the question on her face. There was too much, too much to account for. Instead, all he said was, "I've gotta go. Korra, can you take me to…"

"No!" Jin cried and clung tighter.

Korra adjusted the girl's position in her arms and turned around. "I don't know if it's a good idea for me to leave just yet."

Turning to her door man, Asami asked to have a motorcycle brought around front for him to use.

"I don't know if it's such a good idea for him to go just yet either," said Korra, meeting his eyes with a look of intense concern he'd learned to read as "don't be a fucking idiot."

He pretended he didn't see it, didn't know what she was thinking. Jin finally let Korra set her down, and Asami started to usher the girl toward the house, smiling brightly and casting worried looks backward. Taking the diary out of his coat pocket, he walked forward and held out the diary, which Korra took in her outstretched hand. "Keep it safe for me, ok?"

"Of course. But Mako…"

"I'm just going to the hospital."

"I'm sure. And after that?"

"What is it that you're afraid I'm going to do?"

"You're not ok. I think you just need to, you know, think about what's going on."

Her concern was starting to get annoying. "I think you're probably the last person who should be giving me lectures about thinking before acting."

Her eyes turned angry. "I just get the feeling you might do something stupid, ok?"

"Don't worry. I won't do anything you would do, ok?"

He didn't let her next retort hit the air, but it was clear that she was hurt. "I have to go. Thanks for your help," he said abruptly as the motorcycle arrived at the front of the house. With a quick expression of gratitude toward Asami, he kicked off and tore down the long driveway, passing the front gate of the Sato residence and re-entering the city at a blistering speed, the cold hair raking across his face and stinging his eyes until they watered.

 

He really was going to the hospital, but she was right. He wasn't ok. As he raced through the streets, it was like he had entered a tunnel, his brain focusing toward a narrow point in front of him. He was barely aware of the rush of the streets around him, only the pounding blood in his brain and the hope that Huang and Zhang's presence at the apartment didn't mean he was too late.

He didn't even bother to find a legal parking space. He was off almost before the keys left the ignition. The doors to the hospital parted like they were made of air. Mako took four long strides toward the desk and saw the same bored attendant get up from his chair and make as if to protest his presence, but Mako didn't even stop. He went straight to the stairwell and took the steps two at a time. In the hallway, he saw the White Lotus guards they'd sent incognito the night before, and neither of them looked happy. One of them tried to stop him, but he lunged past and stepped into the room to see Miao struggling for breath in her bed, her eyes wide with the effort of it, her skin grey.

And on the other side of her bed sat Tenzin.

The airbender saw him standing there, panting, his mouth agape and brain swiftly doing calculations, trying to decide whether this was real or not.

"We arrived about an hour ago to have her released. The healers said she started having trouble breathing this morning. She is passing."

"They've killed her they've killed her they've killed her," was all Mako could think. "They found the guy I tied up, and they killed her." But what he said was, "Isn't there anything that can be done?"

"Nothing."

"Have they checked for…"

"They did. At my request. There are no signs of foul play here."

"That's not possible."

"Her heart was weak, Mako. She endured a great deal of stress in the last few days." Mako couldn't help but feel an accusation in those words, even if it wasn't intended as such.

"Come, sit quietly with me," he said. "These last moments of hers should be peaceful."

It was a tall order. The urge to keep fighting was insuppressible. He wanted to find someone, anyone whom he could hold responsible and scream in their face. He wanted to do precisely what Korra was worried about—go back to where he'd left Zhang and finish what he'd started. He'd let out the fire always threatening to burn its way to the surface of his reserve, and once it was out, it was tough to put back.

He was still standing by the bed, fists clenched, ready to spring toward…something, when Miao's head suddenly turned toward him, and the look in her eyes was one of terror. She looked, for a moment, like a child, like her granddaughter even. But the emotion behind her eyes was one he felt in his own soul. It was the look of someone whose iron grip on the chaos had slipped, fatally this time. No amount of ledger keeping or son-in-law hating or beating her granddaughter into line could keep her world from falling apart.

Mako recoiled inwardly before his head jerked up to find Tenzin staring at him with serene grey eyes, eyes that understood that conquering the chaos wasn't the point. It was those eyes that held Mako as he sat down next to Miao. And in his strong young hand he took her withered one. "She's safe," he whispered, and he felt the gentle pressure of her fingers trying to wrap around his. He returned it, cupping his other hand around their clasped ones and holding firmly. "The Avatar is protecting her."

This was all he could give her, the woman who no longer believed in any justice that man could provide, who had no reason to trust it. And it was all he had himself in that moment, the knowledge that he had helped someone who needed it even if it did turn out to be in the clumsiest way possible. He'd given this woman's family to Korra, to the light spirit, and for the time being, they would both have to believe in things they did not understand and didn't know how to trust.

His eyes found hers again, and this time they were calm. Her breathing grew even shallower, and Mako knew that this was likely the end. Tenzin gently turned her head heavenward, leaned over next to Miao's ear and began to chant softly, and his voice washed over all of them like a warm wind coming up from the sea:

"Oh well-born Miao, the time has now come for you to seek the Path. Your breathing is about to cease. I have set you face to face with the Light; and now you will encounter it in all its reality, wherein all things are like the cloudless sky, and the naked, spotless mind is like a transparent void without circumference or centre. And in this moment, know yourself, and abide in that knowing."

Mako had never heard these words before. They were more feeling than sense, atmosphere than instruction, and he felt Miao's energy grow still. Tenzin repeated himself three times before Mako felt her stop fighting, and when his eyes met the old master's, Tenzin nodded as if to confirm that it was over.

As Mako became once again aware of his own body, there was a tightness in his throat that he didn't expect to find. Tenzin stood to close the woman's eyes before circling the bed and placing a hand on Mako's shoulder. "You did everything you could," he said. "Everything you promised."

"They killed her." The prevailing calm was starting to desert him.

"We don't know that they did."

"We don't know that they didn't."

There was a silence, and Mako felt the confusion rising again, threatening to overwhelm him.

"Lin is returning. An investigation will be opened."

It was a cold comfort. "I can't really prove anything." A diary, he thought, couldn't answer back once the accused offered up denials. It couldn't corroborate. Couldn't explain. Jin was a terrified child. Could he ask her to face the men who had killed her parents? Could he put her through that? Again? Would he be right in doing so?

"Maybe it really isn't up to you to prove anything. You've done everything you were supposed to. Now it all depends on others." And with that Tenzin passed out of the room, leaving him alone with his dead.

But didn't everything depend on him? Wasn't he the one who had to hold all the fractured pieces together? Make everything right? Keep everyone—brother, lover, surrogate family, innocents—alive and unwounded? What would it mean if he couldn't?

The room was peaceful rather than ghostly, but he felt like he was watching it through one-way glass, omniscient but unable to touch or affect anything that he saw.

Tenzin sent him home. He left, but he didn't obey. He didn't return the motorcycle either. Or go back to Korra and Asami. There was no one he wanted to talk to right now. He rode slowly through the streets, feeling like a flask that had been drunk dry and discarded on the ground. A steady drizzle that had started mid-afternoon turned to sleet, and he stopped for a second on a deserted street to listen to it plink against the pavement, an irregular staccato beat to match the off-kilter rhythm of the world.

"Why am I so fucked up over this?" he thought. Not everything had worked out. There had been unintended consequences, but Tenzin was right when he said that other people would take it from here. Some kind of justice would emerge. But he was still miserable.

Maybe Akihiro had been right from the beginning. Maybe he had always always always been fighting for himself, looking for revenge in the misery of a family that was ultimately nothing like his. Then again, maybe it really was justice and his frustration with a system that could ultimately only offer so much to the people who needed it most, that allowed corruption and complacency to seep into its veins and poison its heart.

But then, maybe he was just self-destructing, looking to lose himself in something now that everything in his world had changed, now that his self was no longer a thing he recognized. "Maybe I just miss what it was like to fight alongside her and understand what the stakes were." Not everything, after all, was the end of the world. Sometimes it was just the end of someone's world, and it took a lot to get anyone else to take notice. "Or maybe," he reflected. "Maybe I just miss her."

He kicked off from the curb and rode away from his thoughts, the sleet stinging his uncovered face and creating a cold, wet spot in the gap between his drooping scarf and his neck. He recognized the undifferentiated block buildings whizzing past and realized he was in Jin's part of town, somewhere near her apartment. He thought about trying to find it, but he knew there would be nothing there for him. Still, he darted around the back alleys, taking the turns a little too fast, looking for he knew not what.

What he did find was a slick oily patch in the middle of the road that sent his bike skidding. He firebent to try to dry off the road and leaned into the skid to try to correct it, but it didn't help. His centre of gravity was way out over one side of the bike, and he felt the wheels slip out from under him as he fell—hard—to one side. His right shoulder took the full force of the impact, and from the knife-sharp pain that stabbed through him, he knew he'd managed to do something really bad to himself.

Mako groaned, kicking his legs free of the bike and pushing himself up with his left arm. He gritted his teeth against the pain, cursing as he fought his way to his feet. His right knee was sore but functional. There was probably road rash underneath his clothes. The cold sting of the sleet on his cheek told him his face was scratched up. But it was his right arm and shoulder that really hurt. He couldn't really move it. He reached up under his jacket with the left and felt a slight bulge where one shouldn't be—probably dislocated.

He cradled the hurt arm against his stomach and did his best to right the bike. It wobbled perilously as he attempted to mount it.

"Experiencing some trouble there, Detective?"

The voice was unmistakable, and Mako's belly turned hot, his unhurt muscles primed as he turned around. Zhang's figure materialized in the dim light, walking toward him flanked by Huang and a few other thugs—two men and two women that he didn't recognize, as big as houses. It gave Mako a slight sense of satisfaction to know that they were scared to face him alone. Even more satisfying was the sight of Zhang's bandaged nose, the skin underneath his eyes tinged a livid purple. Still, he wasn't in a hurry to fight five…six guys with a bum arm.

"No Avatar back up this time, huh? You really do need to work on that charm." Zhang spat on the ground.

"I'm not looking for trouble, right now. Just trying to get home."

"This is nowhere near your home." The group took a few steps forward.

Making as if to ignore them, Mako tried to mount the bike again, wincing with pain as he tried to steady it.

"Huang, help our colleague out, would you?" And before Mako could raise a word of protest, Huang took three steps toward him and punched him in the gut. Fresh pain bloomed where the fist had landed as Mako bent in half and then reflexively struck out with a fireblast from his left. Huang blocked him with a shield made from the sleet itself but was forced back toward Zhang.

Mako sent more fireballs in their direction and saw the silhouettes of Zhang and Huang's back-up leap into action. He struck out wildly, doing the best he could with one arm. One of the thugs (most likely triad) took a fireball square in the chest, while another was sent careening into a wall with a well-placed kick to the stomach. Mako smiled at how well he was doing, the burn and the rush of the fight coating his veins with its analgesic power and letting him forget the pain in the arm he still held tightly against his side.

What happened next happened as if in slow motion. He was holding off one of the women, a hand-to-hand fighter who kept trying to close the distance as he sent another man to the ground with a foot to the groin. Mako was starting to tire a bit, and as one of the wounded assailants came back at him for more, Mako temporarily lost track of where everyone was, and the woman slipped forward with a few strikes precise under his left armpit that had less impact than he expected.

That is, until he tried to throw another fire blast. "Chi-blocker," he thought. And now he was starting to worry. The ache of exertion crept into his muscles, and the pain in his right shoulder started to throb anew. She saw him falter and sprang forward again with a strike to his left hip and then his right. And he felt the flow of chi within him halt, his limbs suddenly useless. And with the taste of fear forming in his mouth, he felt a powerful kick send him to the ground.

The attackers—wounded and not-so-wounded alike—formed a menacing circle around him. Mako tried to get up. He couldn't get up. Zhang, who had stood aloof from the fray like the fucking coward he was, stepped into the center.

"See, where you're at, as I'm sure you've realized, is our territory. And you're trespassing."

"How long do you think that's going to last, Zhang?" he spat back. "I've got Bei Fong on your tail. And I've got a witness. And I've got evidence. What do you think is going to keep you—or your boss—from getting scraped off these streets like shit off a boot?"

Zhang just looked at him with contempt and shrugged. And as if to Mako's insult poetically complete, Zhang swung back with one foot and drove the toe off his shoe into the fallen man's face. Mako's ears rang. He felt the cartilage in his nose break and blood run into his mouth. The next kicks landed against his ribs. And with a motion from their leader, the rest of the group came forward and took their turns. Mako lost track of which blows came from where. Once he'd given up on trying to fight back or escape, he tried to curl inward and protect his head and his center only to be dragged up by his shirt for another punch. At some point, a boot rammed into his dislocated shoulder, and he started to black out from the pain. "So this is how I'm going to die," he thought for a second.

With his last shred of consciousness, he was aware of everything around him suddenly stopping. The pain was still there, but the blows stopped coming. The shouts were still in his ears, but they were gradually getting distant as one by one his attackers started to disappear.

He rolled a little to one side, away from the voices, and what he saw stopped his ragged breath. She was standing in the middle of a whirlwind, and her eyes were glowing, and her fists were blazing forward with strikes that sent invisible forces charging past him and into the bodies of his assailants.

And then suddenly her eyes were no longer full of Raava, and she bolted forward, running to take Zhang and Huang by the collars and throw them against a wall as the rest of the pack scattered in all directions as soon as they hit the main street. She put her boot on Huang's back and hoisted Zhang above her head by his jacket, her eyes full of a fury Mako had learned to both hate and love and fear and rely upon. And when she spoke, it wasn't the Avatar Spirit. It was just her, and she was screaming into the man's face that this was fucking over, that she had the power of the elements and the motherfucking Spirit of Light on her side, and she was saying that this was over. The two of them had twenty-four hours to turn themselves in to Bei Fong and the President or she'd send them where she sent Unalaq, even though they were barely worth her fucking time.

She let Zhang's body fall to the ground and just watched as the two of them struggled mightily to get up and stagger down the alley, her face registering satisfaction and enjoyment at their discomfiture.

Mako tried to rise, but it was his right hand that he forgetfully pushed off with, and the pain rocked through him like sick fire. He caught himself with his left as he fell and barely held himself up as his stomach emptied its contents onto the pavement. He'd barely eaten anything that day, and his throat burned and tongue tasted of bile.

Through his anguished heaves, he heard her feet approach, and her hands fluttered over him as she knelt, afraid to touch him lest she hurt him. Once he was sure he wouldn't vomit on her, he let his head collapse against her thigh, and her cool palm rested gently on the side of his face.

"I was looking for you," she said softly, and it sounded like there were tears in her voice.

"You found me." And the world around him fogged over as he lost consciousness.


	10. Chapter 10

Sleep. He wanted to sleep, but…

“Mako, stay with me, ok?” She was holding one of his eyes open and looking into it by the light of a flame that burned in her hand, throwing dark shadows across her face and deepening the lines that creased her forehead.

It hurt to be awake. It hurt to breathe. Fire burned in his right arm. His head felt like it had been split open. His entire body felt like a bruise. His groin ached where someone—he couldn’t remember which—had kicked him, and a knife of agony raked through his side every time he tried to draw a breath. Cracked ribs, he guessed. The wetness of the pavement was leaching into his clothes, and his only relief was the numbness that was starting to seep into his extremities.

“What’s my name?” she asked, testing his lucidity.

“Korra…” He practically choked it out. His tongue felt swollen in his mouth. 

“Who’s your brother?”

“Bolin.”

“What day is it?”

It all felt stupid. “I have no idea.”

“Right. I’m getting you to a hospital.”

“Korra, I’m kidding.”

“You’re hilarious. You should see your hilarious face right now. Can you get up?”

“I’m not going to the hospital.”

“Mako…”

“Korra, I won’t, ok? I’m not going back there. Not…today.” He could hear his voice rise to a shrill, alien pitch. He felt her recoil a bit, taking in this moment of uncharacteristic panic. She couldn’t have known it, but he was still haunted by the image of an old woman expiring in an unfamiliar bed for reasons that felt suspicious, even if he couldn’t prove anything.

She wiped at her nose and sniffed, and he wondered if she was crying.

“I’m going to be fine. I’ve been beat up worse than this.” He was lying about the last part. “Just get me home, ok?” 

“Ok,” she said finally, after a long silence in which she looked around the alley as if the walls surrounding them might offer assistance. “That was probably a stupid thing I did just now, right?”

He remembered the last thing he’d said to her before he left Asami’s house and winced internally. “You were great,” was the only apology he could summon under the conditions. 

She raised his torso to a sitting position, and he bit back a scream, water filling his eyes as he adjusted. 

“Can you stand?” she asked, looking skeptical. He thought so. Using the shoulder she offered as support, he pushed off with his good arm and got on his feet. The blood instantly rushed away from his head and he felt himself blacking out again, the skin on his face turning cold and clammy and his stomach preparing to do a repeat performance. Korra caught him unsteadily—her strength barely making up for their difference in size—and he collapsed against her, realizing too late that the blood from his face was all over his hands and sleeves and the front of his coat and was transferring—along with grime from the pavement—onto her clothes.

Korra whistled for Naga, who jogged over and laid down on the pavement on command, flattening herself out as best she could to give Mako a shorter climb. Korra mounted first without ever letting go of him before helping him ease a leg over the saddle. The contact awakened the soreness in his crotch, and he felt ill at the thought of the jarring usually produced by Naga’s loping strides.

“Let’s go slow, ok?” he asked. 

“I’ll do my best, but I need to get to work on you soon, though, or you’re going to take forever to heal.”

He nodded, realizing with a touch of chagrin that by refusing to go to the hospital he had basically dragooned her into taking care of him. Pondering the problematic intimacy of that request and whether it outweighed his dread of a public ward where possible enemies could wander in at will, he tried to find a way to secure himself on Naga’s saddle. The need for a respectful distance between them felt urgent, but there was no way he could hold onto the back.

“What are you doing? Hang onto me,” she said, seeing him fumble for a grip. He knew he looked ridiculous, barely able to hold himself upright and still trying to look casual and unruffled by her attention.

“I’m a mess.”

“You think I can’t see that?”

He still couldn’t move his right arm, but he looped the other around her waist, leaning on her reluctantly at first before letting the weight of his torso fall against her back, her strength like mercy. The hair at the back of her neck was wet with sleet and sweat, the skin left bare above her collar warm where he let his chin sink, his body craving the physical support his mind wanted to deny him. 

“You got kicked in the head, Mako,” she said. “So stay awake, ok?”

He’d always wondered about that rule—the one that said you couldn’t go to sleep after a head injury—especially now, when sleep felt so right. The chemicals that had flooded his brain in the heat of battle had begun to desert him, leaving only exhaustion and a pain that made him crave oblivion. But he did his best to obey, fixing his gaze on a point at the back of Naga’s head.

The ride seemed endless, and it was getting colder. At one point, he thought he felt her shiver—not a usual thing for her—and wondered where her parka was. He remembered riding with her across the tundra, just a few months ago, and marveling that human beings lived under conditions like those, amazed when she would touch him and her hands still felt warm on his bare skin. 

“Get under the covers,” he says, exasperated, and she laughs at him before crawling between the furs, legs braiding together, lips hot, pushing away the chill on his face, core burning against his thigh like a live ember. His foot brushes against her calf and it’s freezing and she shrieks in surprise. “Warm yourself up, firebender guy.”

“Mako.” He felt a hard pinch to the flesh around his ribs and came to in pieces. Korra was twisted awkwardly in the saddle, trying to wake him up and keep him from falling off at the same time. “Stick with me, bruiser. We’ve got a ways to go.”

She’d unbuttoned his jacket to find a place to pinch him and was supporting him as best she could. Mako wondered how long he’d been out. He felt like a bag of sand collapsing under its own weight. 

“I’m trying.”

She turned back around, satisfied once she heard his voice, and nudged Naga on. “Go over our pro-bending plays.”

“Huh?”

“Tell me all the plays we used to practice when we were on the Fire Ferrets. Don’t try to pretend for a second that you don’t still have them memorized.”

“Korra…”

“Do it, or I’ll tell Naga to run the rest of the way.”

“Turtle-duck formation. Waterbender сenter, defending,” he began. And as if it was coming from somewhere outside of himself, he listened to his own voice drone out nearly the entire playbook, words beginning to slur together as if he were drunk. It took an hour to get where they were going, and when Naga finally came to a stop, he realized…

“This is…”

“…my place. It’s closer. Also, no stairs.”

And for that he was thankful, thinking of what three flights would be like when he could barely manage three steps without fainting. But it felt strange, as if he were once again an invader in this space she had carved out for herself in his absence from her life. 

Mako practically fell off of Naga into Korra’s arms, taking a second while he found his feet and she eased his left arm around her shoulders so that he could lean on her as she fumbled for her keys and got them inside. They entered the small main room, and Naga followed them right in, curling up in a corner and looking at him balefully.

Korra practically carried him into the bathroom and made him sit on the toilet seat. 

“What hurts?” she said, turning the knobs on the bathtub until water started to flow in. The room was too small for two people, and their legs were almost touching while she stood over him. The intimacy of it was excruciating.

“Everything?”

“More specific.”

She started trying to help him get his jacket off, and when she moved his right arm, he yelled involuntarily. 

“Ok,” she said, taking her hands off him for a second before returning to palpate his shoulder. “Did this happen during the fight?” she asked, feeling the grotesque lump there.

“I crashed the motorcycle.”

“So you fought with your shoulder like this?” Her eyebrows quirked up, and he felt a little of his pride return. Months ago, he’d have used this to impress her. 

“Kind of.”

“This is going to be hard to do without another person,” she said. “But I want you to grab that pipe there and resist me as much as you possibly can. Ok?”

“Have you done this before?”

“I’ve had it done to me before. You’re the one who won’t go to the hospital, tough guy.”

He couldn’t argue with her, reminded once again that he was asking too much of her. With his good arm, he grabbed the bare pipe that stuck out of the wall, priming himself for what was about to happen.

“Do you want something to bite down on?” She removed her pelt and looped the soft leather around his right elbow, placing a boot on his hip for extra leverage. He just looked at her, wary but not about to show weakness.

“Suit yourself. One, two…” and before she got to three, she pulled away from his body, and a blinding white flash of pain coursed through him. He felt a scream rip its way out of his throat and heard a click as the joint snapped back into place. In a second, it was over and the pain in his shoulder subsided, making room for the throbbing agony that pulsed throughout the rest of his body. 

“Let’s try the jacket again,” she said after giving him a moment to recover. 

He nodded, unable to refuse anything anymore. The jacket came off, but it was torture. He didn’t yell this time, but he felt the bile rising, his innards protesting every movement and contortion of his battered form. When the last arm was free, he slumped forward, nearly passing out again but thankful that he could now catch himself with both elbows on both badly bruised knees. No doubt reading his distress in the sickly paleness of his skin, she pulled a wastebasket in front of him. He heaved a couple of times, but there was nothing left in his body. Dousing a washcloth in cold water, she pressed it against his clammy forehead and the back of his neck, a trail of grime appearing on the fabric as she wiped with one hand and shut the stream of water off with the other.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, stepping out of the room and leaving him alone to draw in breath after anguished breath, head pounding, lungs ragged. From his seated position, he tried to turn around, and out of his peripheral vision got a look at his face. It’s didn’t really look like his face. Everything was the wrong shape and the wrong color. One eye was nearly swollen shut. His chin was puffed out to twice its normal size, and his nose was at a weird angle. He’d seen himself after a pounding before, but this was shocking. He felt his throat get tight and his hands start to shake, but he was determined not to cry.

“Yeah, you’re not at your prettiest right now,” he heard Korra’s voice say as her figure appeared in the mirror. He watched her hand venture near the swollen mass that was his face and gently turn it back so that he was facing her. “But it’s going to be ok. Trust me.”

There was a pair of shears in her hand.

He did trust her. He did, but it was hard to fully give in to what was needed, to sit there while his ex-girlfriend cut his shirt and then his undershirt off his body. Her lips formed a line as more of his skin came into view, and he wondered how bad it looked. From his vantage point, he could see an enormous, angry bruise covering most of his left side, several smaller ones forming on his forearms, which he’d used to try to protect himself. 

“Um, I need you to stand.” Her voice was quiet, tight. She reached for him as he rose, but he waved her off.

“I can do it,” he said. And he kicked off his boots and undid his belt. His pants slid to the floor, but his underwear stayed on. He didn’t ask permission, and she didn’t object. Her eyes said she felt as uncomfortable as he did.

Korra helped him into the water, which was uncomfortably cool. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s for the swelling.”

He stretched out as best he could, too tall for such a small tub, too stiff to fully extend his limbs, and tried to stare at the ceiling as she started to work. 

At first, she just moved the water back and forth, reading his energy and balancing it. “No internal bleeding,” she said, relief making her voice a bit louder. 

Once he adjusted to the temperature, the water became soothing, easing the most pronounced of his pains as it flowed over him and around him. Finally, she gathered a bubble of water into her hands and began at his head. Gradually, the pain of the concussion subsided, then the puffy feeling in his face. He realized that he was able to open his left eye a little bit more and close it again with less discomfort than before. 

Then she set the cartilage in his nose—not the first time someone had had to do that for him—and pain briefly roared back. “Sorry,” she said, before passing her hands over it quickly, the water bubble briefly cutting off his air supply. 

As she moved down his torso, he felt himself slipping away again. She nudged him a few times to keep him conscious. “You can sleep soon. I promise,” she kept saying. And he realized with shame that of the two of them, she was the one who had been awake for two days straight. 

Korra worked on his cracked ribs for a while and continued moving downward. “Um,” she said. “Did they…” He realized she was looking at his groin, which still flared with pain, the muscles of his right upper thigh trembling spasmodically. He almost burst into tears of mortification, turning his head to the wall and refusing to meet her eyes as she healed that too. 

When she’d finished, he looked down and saw that he’d turned the water a translucent brown. She drained the tub and filled it again, warm this time. He watched her perplexedly as she added something to the water that smelled like eucalyptus and sandalwood and soaked a washcloth. It took him a second to realize that she was bathing him. As he watched her hands move toward him again, he was again overtaken by the awareness of this childish, ridiculous vulnerability and the profundity of the service she was performing for him. It was too much. This, at least, was something he could do for himself. “Don’t,” he said. “I can do it.” He grabbed the washcloth from her hand, and she jumped back as if he’d burned her. 

“Sure,” she said, standing and rushing out of the room, clearly self-conscious, and he hated himself.

He scrubbed himself down, aware for the first time just what a relief it was to feel clean again. It was difficult without full range of motion, and his skin was tender under partially healed bruises that were yellowing at the edges. Korra came back with a bundle that she dropped on the floor, a towel, an undershirt, and a pair of shorts he recognized as his own.

“I, uh, still had these…um…” she turned again as if to give him privacy.

“Korra,” he said, arresting her departure and trying to make up for embarrassing her. “I’m going to need some help here.”

“Oh right.” She helped him out of the tub, keeping him at arm’s length, handing him the towel as if she was suddenly shy about touching him too much. As she tried not to meet his gaze, he got a good look at her for the first time in awhile and saw to his chagrin that she was smeared front and back with dirt and his blood, her clothes likely ruined, her hair a disastrous tangle. She was still beautiful. 

“Thanks,” he managed, and almost fell as he tried to take a step forward. The pain was less acute, but his body simply wouldn’t do what he wanted it to do. Every muscle and bone in his body had abandoned its task. She supported him with her arm as he dressed, looking away as he changed his shorts. 

Korra helped him into her bed, where fragments of her scent clung to the sheets and pillows and enveloped him. How much simpler this would be, he thought, if this was where he always slept. 

“I’m going to have to get you up in a few hours for another session,” she said. “Or you’re going to be in a lot more pain.” 

“You need some sleep,” he said, looking into her blue eyes, glassy and purple-rimmed with exhaustion. 

“I’ll get some. This is more important right now.” 

Her fingers brushed idly at the sheets near his hip, and he tentatively caught the tips of them with his own. 

“Why does everything have to be so hard right now?” he asked. It wasn’t a very specific question, but she looked into his eyes sadly, like she knew exactly what he was talking about. 

“I wish I knew.”

 

Mako drifted off a couple of times, but he was too uncomfortable to really get into a deep sleep. He woke up to bursts of activity from Korra. First, she was on the phone. Then he heard her in the bathroom, most likely cleaning herself up. Soon there were other people around the bed—Pema with another acolyte in tow. And they were helping Korra mix up some medicine and arrange some other supplies. They wrapped his torso with bandages and gave him a cup of something that smelled strange. 

“It’ll help with the pain,” Pema said, and he drank it gratefully. 

He heard Pema packing up and asking Korra if she was going to be ok taking care of him, and then oblivion kicked in. At a couple of points, he remembered Korra’s hands moving over him again, the glow of healing water breaking up the dimness of her room. He remembered trying to say something, but it was all so indistinct, hazy at the edges, moments melting together like different colors of candle wax. She was standing next to him and then she was on the bed at his left looking like she hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Her boots were still on, right arm bent underneath her head, forehead creased a little like she was thinking very hard as she slept. He thought he reached for her at one point, touching the hand that was splayed out on the blanket between them. And he thought her face relaxed when he did. But he couldn’t be sure.

And then she was gone again and coming back into the room, her hair damp this time, a cup of tea and a bowl of conjee in her hands. He ate slowly and then went back to sleep. She came back to heal him again an hour later.

The dreams that came with the medicine were vivid and usually terrifying: men burning alive as the floor of a building broke underneath him, falling falling falling, people calling out to him from a darkness his eyes couldn’t penetrate—Jin and then his brother, Asami, his parents, Korra. Then he would wake up sweating. He lost track of time. Day and night bled together, and the flat felt like some kind of liminal place between worlds, where nothing was quite real, and he wondered how much the world outside was changing as he remained here in stasis. 

A lot, as it turned out. 

“I talked to Bei Fong an hour ago,” she said when she brought him dinner, sitting down in a chair next to him and resting one foot on the other knee. “Your sparring buddies are in lock up pending trial.”

He tried to raise his eyebrows, but the skin on his face still felt tight with bruising. “What’s the charge?”

“Attempted murder of a police officer.” She was grinning wickedly at him, and he smiled back.

“Any witnesses?”

“There was one at the scene, as it turns out. She talked.”

“Credible?”

“Questionable.”

He laughed.

“I gave her the diary. She’s promised to investigate all the claims. Things aren’t looking good for your ex-partner or his little goon.”

“What about Akihiro?”

Her face became serious. “There’s nothing that implicates him directly. Zhang and Huang aren’t really talking yet.”

“There’s gotta be.”

“Bei Fong isn’t…pleased, shall we say, with the way things went in her absence. She said something about early retirement.”

Mako scoffed. “He’ll probably even get his pension.”

“This investigation looks like it will be thorough. If he’s dirty, I suspect something will turn up.”

“No guarantees though.”

“There never are.”

“Things would be so much easier if I could handle bad guys the same way you handled Unalaq.”

She took the empty bowl of noodles from his hand, a little more roughly than necessary, and made to leave the room. “You’re an idiot if you think that’s easy.”

 

After two days, he was able to get up and walk all the way across the room on his own. On the third day, Korra let him have visitors. His visitor was Bolin, who brought him fresh clothes and performed lines from his latest “project,” as he called it. 

On the fourth day, Asami called to say that Jin had made it school safely and seemed to be doing well.

On the fifth, he was down to three healing sessions a day. Korra insisted he stay so that she could avoid running across town to take care of him.

“You don’t have to take care of me like this,” he said. “If it’s, you know, weird to have me here.”

She looked at him seriously, her hands holding the water in midair. “You need something. And I can provide it. That’s all this is,” she said. “I don’t feel weird.”

But he didn’t believe her. Because even though he was grateful, it was still weird for him. The touch of a lover and the touch of a healer are different, but his body and his heart could scarcely tell. Her hands would knead his muscles to remove tension and leave trails of longing in their wake. Sometimes her fingers would linger a little longer on his skin than they needed to, and he knew this new rhythm, these new habits were stranger for her than she let on. He didn’t dare assume that she still wanted him, and he didn’t dare make any declarations or promises that would fall apart as soon he stepped back into the real world. 

But something had to give. 

On the last day of the week, she declared him well enough to go home and heal on his own. They stood in the bathroom next to the sink as she worked over his ribs, still slightly tender but strong thanks to her relentless attentions. 

“I don’t think I’ve really thanked you,” he said.

She smiled but kept her eyes on his middle. “You don’t need to.”

“I owe you.”

“Ok, I can go along with that.”

They were quiet as he brooded over how little he had to offer her.

“Just don’t…” she said haltingly. “Just don’t ignore me from here on out, ok? I know the friends thing is hard, but I need you around. And I think you need me too.”

“Yeah,” he said, and his chest felt like it was being squeezed, as if the bandages she had removed were back on and being pulled tight until his lungs threatened to burst. 

What happened next was inevitable. She said something he only half heard about meaning it when she said she still loved him, but something something something…and his mouth covered hers as if it was desperate to consume her words, hands gripping her biceps and feeling them flex against his touch. 

And for a second—a long second—she kissed him back. Her healing water fell to the floor, splashing around their bare feet, her hands gripping his sides painfully until she pushed back.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said breathlessly. “This isn’t…”

“I know,” he responded. And he kissed her again. Because he still only knew one way to love her. Because this was unfinished business and because he just couldn’t anymore. 

He felt her body come into contact with his as her arms looped around his waist and his hands moved along her shoulders, one continuing down her back and the other roughly pulling her hair free and weaving his fingers through it. It was all so…pathetic, he thought, this loss of control, this inability to keep his composure, to keep his want in check. But he needed to let it go or be burnt up by it, and he could only pray that she was burning too.

He had reason to hope. The sounds that reverberated from Korra’s mouth were deep and desperate, and he caught the vibrations against his tongue. He felt her probing the dips of his spine and running a hand into his pants to clutch at his ass, and the hardness that had been slowly forming at his front sprang suddenly to life.

As Mako let one hand slide carelessly just under the hem of her shirt, he turned them so that she was pressed against the counter. She was still recklessly exploring his body, but he was scared for a second that it was all pantomime on her end, that he was alone in this desperate hunt for relief. 

“Don’t do this because you feel sorry for me,” he whispered into her mouth. 

“I don’t feel sorry for you,” she responded, looking him dead in the eyes. And after pulling her bottom lip between his, he messily kissed his way down her throat and torso, taking a second to drag his teeth over a nipple that budded beneath her shirt. She gasped and threaded her fingers through his hair as he knelt down, pulling her pants to the floor as he went before running his hands upward from her ankles to her hips, feeling the fine hairs rise as goose bumps formed against his fingers. He pressed his face to her underwear and felt wetness and warmth through the fabric. And then those were gone too.

“Do you want this?” he asked, panting against the soft curve where her lower belly met her sex. 

The hand in his hair gripped tighter, pushing him down slowly and squeezing harshly until his jaw fell open. 

“I want this,” she said, her voice strangled as he gently nudged her thighs apart and pressed his mouth onto her, fingers opening her up to him, tongue finding its way to where she was swollen and needed him most.

“I want this.” Her tone was high and distant. “I want this so much.”


	11. Chapter 11

The first time she came was with white knuckles clinging to the counter and soft groans that echoed off the tile walls. Then, there was a frantic search for prophylactics among the stuff that she had yet to organize, and when she found it, he almost cried with relief. There was always a danger that they might come tumbling down from the precarious ledge they'd just climbed onto, and he was desperate for her. She seemed equally frantic, clutching at his hand and dragging him toward her bed, where he was pushing inside of her the second after she pulled him down onto the mattress.

Sex hadn't always gone perfectly for them, a breeding ground as it was for further miscommunications and the opening of fresh wounds. But they had always been hungry for each other, willing to struggle to iron out the wrinkles in search of the ecstasy they somehow managed to find amidst the mess. Their progress at slowly learning each other's bodies had been arrested by their precipitous break up.

And so this time, there was old and there was new. What he encountered when he merged with her was both familiar and unexpected. With one climax down, he knew she would let him take just a little bit more time, that her insistent hips would wait before forcing him deeper and pushing him toward a too early finish. It was a cruel irony of their chemistry together that what she liked best was precisely what kept him from completing her half the time. But what he didn't expect was for her to stay still for so long after he'd entered her to just let her hands roam all over him, searching, perhaps, for the details she had noticed for the first time when she was healing him over and over again.

And he, too, was re-learning what he thought he knew. He had never noticed, for example, that one ear lobe was a slightly different shape from the other or that the smooth undersides of her breasts were as if not more sensitive than her nipples. When she grabbed his ass to pull him deeper, he thought she wanted him to start thrusting hard, but instead she held him there with her thighs and just rocked, her movements subtle but still far from calm. Her breath came high and pitchy, the pulse in her throat spiking against his tongue.

"I'm close," she whispered, and he pushed her knees up to her shoulders and moved in and out of her forcefully until her mouth fell open in a scream she couldn't contain. He was gone seconds later, collapsing against her, forehead buried into the pillow, lungs straining with effort. He felt like passing out again.

"Remind me again why we don't work," he asked when he finally rolled off of her to stare blankly at the ceiling as she composed herself, one hand running through the tangles in her hair while the other pulled the sheets up over her breasts.

"You broke up with me, remember?"

"Only the first time."

"I airbended your desk across the room."

"And yet suddenly I can't see why that was such a problem." He smiled at her, not caring how foolish he looked or sounded with his face still flushed and his shoulders baring the marks of her nails and teeth. She laughed a little between panting breaths before grabbing his hand with one of hers and pressing her other one flat against it, the tips of her fingers barely reaching the final joints of his, her creamy dark skin glowing against his ghostly pale palm.

Her face turned sober with thought as she absently traced the lines on his hand with her fingertip.

"We're good at this," she said, still staring at some invisible point between them. She gestured toward the bed, but he knew she was talking about the entire situation that led up to it. "We're good when we both want the same thing, when the stakes are clear and we know we're fighting on the same side. It's everything else that we suck at."

He wanted to say something here about how he would try to do better, that he wouldn't fight her so much. But it wasn't a matter of trying harder. There were things between them that couldn't be fixed by just not making each other mad.

"There are going to be more circumstances where we don't see eye to eye, and it's harder to make the right decisions if we're worried about maintaining a relationship. I think we have to learn how to just be people together for a while," she continued, and not for the first time he felt too small and too big in the context of her life. Sometimes, when she looked at him, it was with the apocalyptic part of her he now knew as Raava, the part of her that suffused him with awe. But most of the time, she looked at him with eyes that were all too human, full of questions he couldn't answer and doubts he couldn't begin to assuage, and of the two it was that part of her that he both loved and feared the most. Because it demanded more of him than he was capable of offering and because they were both too young and too broken for what had been required of them in their brief, terrifying lives.

He looked into her eyes and picked up where her thoughts left off. "If we got back together now," he said, talking to himself and her at the same time, "We'll do something that makes us hate each other."

She nodded. "If I lose you again like that, I know I won't ever be able to look at your dumb face any more. Because it will just hurt too much. And besides, you're still healing." She meant it in so many more ways than one. "It's not a good time to be making big decisions."

Until lately, he'd rarely known her to take the long view. There were things he had yet to learn about her that he wouldn't learn in bed.

"Do you regret doing this?" he asked, gesturing at the sheets that covered them.

She moved over to his side of the bed and rested her head on his shoulder, black hair spilling like sea water across his pale skin. With one hand, she turned his face to her and kissed him. Her lips were a little dry, a little swollen from their prior histrionics. He let himself enjoy the feel of her tongue tracing the edges of his teeth, not caring for the time being about labels or their future or how he was going to cope with the denial that faced him once she left. There would be no avoiding it this time around, no saving face. She had seen him in all of his undisguised want, his desperate vulnerability. And for some reason she still loved him, loved him too much to try to save him from this particular hurt.

Their lips parted with an audible pop. "I regret a lot of things," she said. "But I don't regret this."

It didn't matter that they were supposed to be saying good bye. He pressed back into her mouth and swallowed her answer like a tonic. Her body rose, and he steeled himself for the final loss of contact, for the emptiness he was going to endure because he loved her more than he loved them. But she didn't leave. She straddled his naked body and molded every curve of herself into him, their lips never breaking.

"As long as we're doing stupid things that we don't regret…" she whispered into the breathy silence between kisses.

Like always, the second time was slower, less manic in their keenness to join. He no longer worried that the other shoe was about to drop. They knew where they stood with each other, and if it couldn't be an ideal situation, at least it could be a clear one. For now.

She kissed her way down his torso, languid and unhurried, taking her time at the places where healing bruises still marked his skin. He swept a hand through her tousled hair and enjoyed its coarse texture as it fell through his fingers and the way her breasts pressed against his skin. She mouthed over the expanse of his abdomen and lingered over the protrusions of his hip bones before moving to where he was hard for her again and lowering her mouth over the tip.

He felt every nerve in his body flare with pleasure as she took him as far as she could go, hand wrapping around the rest of him as she straddled one of his legs, sex pressing into his thigh so that she could pleasure them both at once.

He surrendered for a few minutes, knowing there would be only so much he'd be able to take, before tugging at her chin and shoulder to make her come back up to him.

"I need to be in you," he said.

"You were never this impatient before," she breathed against his ear, settling her knees on either side of his hips.

"If this is our last time together, I want every inch of you on me."

She smiled back at him with a hand guiding him inside her, her body sliding down slowly until he was buried to the hilt.

"Who said this is the last time," she whispered sultrily as her tongue pushed past his lips one more time and she rolled her hips into a gentle rhythm.

With his weaker right arm, he secured her waist against him while with his left he pushed them off the bed into a seated position, maintaining the cadence of their lower bodies.

Like this, he felt he could hold on forever, stopping time and maintaining the calculated equilibrium of their bodies. If they never finished then maybe she would never leave. It was a ridiculous and tempting thought that he indulged in as he worshiped her body with his lips and palms. He felt her fingers run lazily over the contours of his back and shoulders, nails soothing his frayed nerves rather than leaving welts. The muscles in her thighs contracted and released as they stayed like this, and he admired the mastery she displayed over the power that played just beneath the surface of her skin, flexing gently beneath his touch.

When they finished this time, it was with groans and bodies pressed flush together, his strong hands pushing down against her hips, anchoring her to him and driving himself as deep as possible. When it was over, their lips met softly, chastely even.

"I love you," she whispered before lifting herself off of him. It was like a benediction, a blessing from a higher power.

Mako didn't remember falling asleep, but when he woke up it was with a body in revolt. Fragments of a bad dream still nestled in deep corners of his brain, and his skin felt wet and clammy. His mouth filled with saliva, and the muscles in his stomach clenched violently. He lurched off the bed and barely made it into the bathroom, kneeling on the cold tile and heaving painfully until there was nothing left.

Spent, he sat down on the floor, back against the wall, letting cold ceramic sooth the itchy hotness on his back. When he closed his eyes, images of people burning burst into vivid life on the backs of his eyelids, and when he opened them, he realized he was crying. Hot tears cut tracks down his face, and he surrendered to the convulsive sobs that shook his body. He wept for everything he had lost, a short lifetime's worth of unspent grief.

He stayed like that for a long time before he heard the door open and saw calloused brown feet shuffle across the tile. He didn't even seen her face as she sat beside him dressed in just a shirt and her underwear and pulled his body across hers, strong fingers running through his hair, cool hands soothing the back of his neck. He let the rhythm of his own breathing match the rise and fall of her stomach and felt the sweat turn to salt on his brow. His eyes itched, and all of his insides felt dehydrated.

"Sorry," he said, the taste of vomit and tears still mingling unpleasantly in his mouth.

"It happens to me sometimes too," she said in a voice still raspy with sleep, and he wondered what her dreams were about, what visions wrenched her from sleep with a cold, sick feeling in her gut—locked in tight spaces, hands reaching out to take her bending…

She helped him up off the floor, made him gulp down some water, and pulled him back to bed. They didn't make love again. The window for that had closed for the time being, and the process of mending their lives as two people apart had begun. But she did stay with him until he fell asleep again, curling herself around him and giving him something to hold onto.

And when he woke up, he was alone in her bed, and he dressed in solitude before finding her in the kitchen making tea. He didn't kiss her good morning. There were no declarations—no arguments either. An hour later, she dropped him off at home on her way to things that did not involve him, and before she mounted Naga to leave, she hugged him good bye, telling him not to be a stranger and saying that maybe she would see him at the gym later in the week. Bolin had gotten her a pass.

On his first day back at work, there was no hero's welcome, just solemn nods in the hallway and a few respectful handshakes. Zhang's desk was empty, yet to be reassigned. As soon as he got seated, the Chief peeked out of her office and summoned him in with a wave.

"Since you came on the force, I've lost a half dozen officers," she said after she closed the door, and he couldn't tell whether this her version of a compliment or something he ought to apologize for. "If you keep doing your job this well, we'll be the only two left standing a year from now, that is if one of these crooks doesn't manage to take you out first."

"I'm…uh…"

"It's a joke, kid."

He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot while she rifled through papers on her desk. The Chief had always had an interesting sense of humor.

"I've taken over this case personally since you've been…indisposed. I hope that doesn't create a problem for you." She looked at him knowingly.

"Not at all."

"I assume you're interested in putting your issues with your former partner and Officer Huang behind you now that you've recovered," she continued.

"That's correct."

"Too bad." Her hands were braced on her hips, and she was clearly taking no shit today. "You're a material witness now and, like it or not, a victim."

He objected to the label, but that clearly wasn't worth bringing up.

"Tomorrow, you're giving a statement about your attack. We already have Avatar Korra's report, so it can wait just a little longer while you attend to other things today."

"Like what?"

"You're going to City Hall."

He was confused.

"No offense," she went on, and he braced himself. "But your little tussle in the alley is only the tip of this particular iceberg. Corruption isn't unprecedented here, but given the temperature of the city after everything that's happened in the past year, this is going to be a sensitive matter. It's in the department's best interests to prosecute all members of this conspiracy, but the case we present has to be ironclad, do you understand?"

"Of course."

"If we go after on one of our people, and he or she walks…or if it looks like this is some sort of sop to the community…if there is any reason to question our credibility…"

"I get it."

"This diary you turned up is an interesting piece of evidence, but I'm sure you understand what its limitations are."

"I do."

"We're going to need the girl to recant her previous testimony, which isn't going to look good. She is going to have to talk to a lot of lawyers, and she will have to testify in court. Do you think she's up to that?"

Mako's stomach clenched a little bit. Jin had been through so much already. It seemed criminal to insist she relive all of this just as she was getting settled into a new life. Her case would need careful handling.

"I think so," he said.

She handed him the file she was looking for. "It's your job to make sure that she is. You're my liaison with the City Attorney on this matter. You're to meet with her this afternoon to brief her, and you're to ensure that this girl's case is handled perfectly." The last statement was punctuated with a finger poking at the papers he held. "Do you understand?"

"Yes, Chief."

"I'm aware that most detectives would find this sort of assignment to be beneath them. I hope you understand…"

"No need," he said, not telling her that this assignment frankly felt like a gift. He was feeling calm and centered for the first time in weeks, like he was finally doing precisely what he was supposed to be doing. He shook Bei Fong's hand. "I won't let you down."

"You haven't yet."

He saw Korra again on the steps of City Hall, standing with a bunch of suits while a photographer scurried around trying to get a good angle and hollering for the Avatar to look in his direction. He laughed to himself at the way she kept turning her head so that all the poor guy could get was the blur of her wolf tails on the fringes of the frame.

As the important-looking people she was evidently meeting with started to lead her away, Mako finally caught her eye, and she waved at him, a big smile painting itself across her face. He hurried off in the direction of the prosecutor's office, taking deep breaths and feeling for a brief instant the calm assurance that while not everything could be mended, not everything was broken either. Because there were a thousand ways to love her, and he was going to learn every one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am not going to lie, even though I cranked it out quickly, this chapter nearly killed me. I've had a lot of fun working on this story for the past two months, but you have to stop before you run out of things to say. This has already turned out twice as long as I expected, and I have reached the ending that I envisioned, so it's time to move on.
> 
> I realize the decision to keep them apart at the end probably disappoints some, but I have a lot of reasons for it. And one of them is that I think Bryke has legitimate reasons for splitting them up—character based as well as the simple fact that it's even more interesting to write them this way (not to mention sexy, at least to me…says the person in a stable relationship).
> 
> Thank you all so much for supporting this story. The comments are so encouraging and really do keep me motivated. If you enjoyed it, I would still love to know how you found it and what kept you reading so that I can keep it in mind for future projects.
> 
> I have more fics planned, including a chaptered one that's already outlined, so keep an eye out. My next one-shot should go up in the next couple of days.


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